Alice Huang-linked firm procured banned Nvidia chips in China. Jensen Huang’s last hours as CEO

Alice Huang-linked firm procured banned Nvidia chips in China. Jensen Huang’s last hours as CEO

Bloomberg reports: A Chinese company founded by Alice Huang, the woman at the center of a controversy dogging Nvidia Corp., procured smuggled AI chips that were installed at a Shanghai data center with links to Megaspeed International Pte, according to documents reviewed by Bloomberg News. Some of the servers were originally sold to Aperia Cloud Services, an official Nvidia Cloud Partner headquartered in Singapore, according to a person familiar with the matter, who requested anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic….

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Howard Lutnick faces questions over Nvidia spy scandal. His sons’ firm has deep ties to the chipmaker

Howard Lutnick faces questions over Nvidia spy scandal. His sons’ firm has deep ties to the chipmaker

CNBC reports: In late September, Cantor Fitzgerald hosted Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and other top executives from the chipmaker for investor meetings in New York, according to a Cantor research report reviewed by CNBC. The Wall Street firm liked what it heard. “We continue to view NVDA as the best risk/reward in our coverage,” Cantor analyst C.J. Muse and his colleagues wrote in a research report dated Oct. 3 that maintained a $350 price target and overweight rating on the…

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Trump bought up to $5 million Nvidia stock as he helped chipmaker with change to export rule

Trump bought up to $5 million Nvidia stock as he helped chipmaker with change to export rule

The Guardian reports: Donald Trump bought Nvidia stock worth millions of dollars as he made decisions on America’s China policy that would benefit the chipmaker, an analysis has found. In May 2025, Trump’s administration rescinded a Biden-era rule designed to prevent the most advanced US-made AI chips from being exported to China. This rule aimed to strengthen the US’s own chip industry and to protect America from what was widely regarded as a national security threat: the possibility that China…

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The tech overlords claim to know the future. So why did they get the midterms so wrong?

The tech overlords claim to know the future. So why did they get the midterms so wrong?

Aaron Zamost writes: The self-styled visionaries of Silicon Valley, leaders like OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and SpaceX boss Elon Musk, have built careers claiming to see the future. Long-term vision is currency: Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg built a 10-year road map for Facebook in 2016, and Google famously told investors before its public offering that it was unconcerned with short-term results. And yet there they all were, a mere five weeks before the midterm elections, gathered at the White House…

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Advocacy groups sue AI giants to freeze new models, warning of ‘catastrophic’ risks

Advocacy groups sue AI giants to freeze new models, warning of ‘catastrophic’ risks

The Associated Press reports: A coalition of online safety and consumer advocacy groups on Thursday sued five of the world’s leading artificial intelligence companies to halt further development, alleging the tech giants can’t prevent their own creations from causing “catastrophic” harm. The lawsuit in San Francisco Superior Court follows a midterm election that could bring a moment of reckoning for the fast-moving AI industry, as Democrats who won back control of Congress stress the need to regulate the technology. The…

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Israeli spy chief in Washington as Netanyahu presses Trump to resume war

Israeli spy chief in Washington as Netanyahu presses Trump to resume war

Axios reports: The director of the Israeli spy agency Mossad is in Washington Friday for talks with senior Trump administration officials about the war in Iran, according to three sources with knowledge of the matter. Why it matters: The visit by Roman Gofman, one of Benjamin Netanyahu’s closest confidants, comes as the Israeli prime minister is pressing President Trump to resume the war against Iran. Driving the news: Gofman is meeting with CIA Director John Ratcliffe, the sources said. He…

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The evolving story of how chemistry became biology

The evolving story of how chemistry became biology

Yasemin Saplakoglu writes: Around 4.6 billion years ago, some 9 billion years after the birth of the universe, a cloud of gas and dust collapsed into the familiar blinding ball in our sky. Scraps of leftover material collided and accreted into the planets of the solar system, including our own. For the next few hundred million years, Earth was a hellish, molten landscape bombarded by meteorites. As it started to cool, water pooled into vast, acidic oceans. The days, half…

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Nvidia’s challenge of replacing an irreplaceable CEO exposes the danger of highly concentrated power

Nvidia’s challenge of replacing an irreplaceable CEO exposes the danger of highly concentrated power

Reuters reports: Ousted Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang ​had an intimate relationship with a second employee, according to two people ‌familiar with the matter, Reuters has learned. The revelation follows two other extramarital affairs that led to his resignation Thursday. The two women are Alice Huang, who US intelligence suspects of being ​a Chinese spy, and Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of health ​care. [Continue reading…] Investor’s Business Daily reports: Chief Executive Jensen Huang’s sudden departure sent Nvidia stock plunging as…

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White House weighs Commerce Secretary Lutnick’s ouster amid Nvidia export concerns, sources say

White House weighs Commerce Secretary Lutnick’s ouster amid Nvidia export concerns, sources say

Reuters reports: Senior White House officials are discussing whether Commerce ​Secretary Howard Lutnick should be pushed out amid a spy scandal surrounding Nvidia’s now-former CEO Jensen Huang, two people familiar with the situation said on ‌Thursday. A growing number of lawmakers criticized Lutnick for the administration’s refusal to add dozens of Chinese companies to a key US trade blacklist, and over whether the government was properly overseeing Nvidia’s exports to China. Criticism of Lutnick’s actions predates Thursday’s resignation of Huang,…

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Bessent and Lutnick clashed over firm at heart of Nvidia affair

Bessent and Lutnick clashed over firm at heart of Nvidia affair

The New York Times reports: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent confronted Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick last week over his handling of a Singaporean company at the heart of revelations about Chinese spying on Nvidia, demanding to know why the United States had not already banned sales of advanced A.I. chips to the firm. The exchange, described by people briefed on it, highlighted growing tensions inside the Trump administration over A.I. policy in general and the Commerce Department’s posture toward Nvidia in…

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The race for AI dominance is only going to become more reckless

The race for AI dominance is only going to become more reckless

Catherine Thorbecke writes: In addition to being an ardent advocate of selling hardware to China, [Jensen] Huang was also one of Silicon Valley’s most powerful champions of open models, where Chinese firms have concentrated their bets. In July, he used his first-ever X post to rally America’s tech industry behind open-weight AI after fears mounted of a US ban on Chinese offerings. He has defended distillation, or training one model on the outputs of another, as a “widely used technique”…

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AI is exposing decades of software vulnerabilities that permeate the internet

AI is exposing decades of software vulnerabilities that permeate the internet

Brett Goldstein writes: On Oct. 29, hackers that FBI analysts link to North Korea stole nearly $6.4 billion from Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange — roughly four times the previous record for a crypto theft. About a week earlier, the National Security Agency told anyone running a website on PHP, the programming language behind roughly 7 in 10 websites, to install an emergency fix or take the site offline after vulnerabilities were discovered. In Japan, more than 20 major…

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Democrats plan investigation into climate and science cuts under Trump

Democrats plan investigation into climate and science cuts under Trump

The New York Times reports: Congressional Democrats have alerted more than 60 companies, individuals and agencies that they are potential targets of investigations into the Trump administration’s cuts to scientific research, rollback of environmental protections and pursuit of unorthodox business deals. The letters reveal where Democrats, soon to be empowered with subpoena authority after their sweeping wins in last week’s elections, intend to focus as they examine some of the administration’s most unabashed deals and policy changes. The notices sent…

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How a metabolic spark could have jump-started life

How a metabolic spark could have jump-started life

Jake Buehler writes: For well over 4 billion years, the fire of metabolism has powered the engines of life. The ability of cells to gather, transform, and harness chemical energy from their surroundings is the central force driving the dizzyingly complex network of chemical reactions that sustains living things. Metabolism is so crucial to life that some researchers believe that these reactions could have helped spark life itself. They argue that life’s first glimmers were found in self-sustaining cycles of…

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