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Good Monday morning.

Netflix-level drama engulfed Silicon Valley on Sunday after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang reportedly admitted to having an affair with Alice Huang, a Chinese citizen who U.S. officials believe was recruited to collect information on him.

While Nvidia initially said there was nothing unusual about Jensen Huang's relationship with Alice Huang, an executive at Singapore-based data center company Megaspeed, Nvidia's board said it will investigate whether Jensen Huang “has been the target of a foreign intelligence effort.”

Jensen Huang will remain Nvidia CEO during the probe. In another twist, there is no obvious replacement for Jensen Huang, who has said time and time again that he wants to remain CEO for decades.

Ta-dum. Let's get started.

— Jody Serrano, with help from Shawn Chen

→ Jensen Huang + Alice Huang = big problems
→ Deepfakes are making it easier than ever to steal
→ Protesters are breaking into data center sites

...and all the AI news we couldn’t fit here.

The news: Jensen Huang has admitted to Nvidia that he "had been intimate" with an executive U.S. officials accused of being a spy for the Chinese government. And the AI chip powerhouse said in a statement that it has opened an investigation into the matter.

Previous reports claimed that Alice Huang, a Singapore-based Megaspeed executive who got close to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, was actually a spy for China's Ministry of State Security. Alice Huang's alleged goals were to learn about Nvidia's most advanced hardware and nudge the leather jacket-wearing CEO into lobbying the U.S. government for more GPU exports to China.

She was reportedly under U.S. surveillance for about a year, and intelligence agencies supposedly briefed President Trump on it last year with no action taken.

The takeaway: This matter is likely to increase scrutiny regarding chip sales to China, which has remained a contentious issue in Washington, especially as a new Congress looking to curb AI prepares to take office in January.

The news: The Justice Department has unsealed charges against three guys who allegedly ran a pretty smooth scam. The trio allegedly used AI to impersonate corporate executives and attorneys at major law firms in a scheme that allegedly stole at least $129 million from hospitals, banks, and other businesses. According to the indictment, filed in the Southern District of New York, employees were tricked into wiring money for recruitment deals that did not exist.

The defendants—Jacob Soall, 41, of Marbella, Spain, and the United Kingdom; Sharon Hazan, 54, of Israel; and Guy Sheetrit, 42, of Israel and the United Arab Emirates—each face seven counts, including conspiracy to commit wire fraud, aggravated identity theft, and money laundering. The wire fraud and money laundering offenses each carry maximum sentences of 20 years, while each aggravated identity theft count carries two years. Any potential sentence would be determined by a judge if the defendants are convicted.

The takeaway: Criminals continue to weaponize AI and other emerging technologies for scams and larger schemes, especially taking advantage of those looking for jobs or help recruiting. More recently, Binance said a bogus recruitment process was a key component of the attack that drained approximately $6.3 billion from the exchange last week. In the end, education seems to be the only real buffer against these schemes while law enforcement tries to chase down those responsible.

The news: The global backlash over data centers is growing. Over a hundred protesters cut through a gate and got onto the construction site of a Microsoft-leased data center in Amsterdam on Friday.

Bloomberg reports that law enforcement made at least one arrest. In a statement to Gizmodo, Microsoft said Friday that it respects protesters' right to express themselves peacefully but condemned "any actions that are unlawful or that put people's safety at risk." Activist group Geef Tegengas, which helped organize the protest, claimed on Instagram that hundreds of activists had blocked construction of the data center to prevent Amsterdam from "being used for the facilitation of genocide and the creation of AI slop."

Two additional days of anti-data center protests were held across Europe this past weekend. Backlash against the structures also made headlines in the U.S., where midterm voters backed limits on the facilities in 40 of 41 local ballot measures.

The takeaway: Together, last week's election results and the protests across Europe suggest that the backlash against data centers is becoming a global problem for the AI industry, and one that isn't going away anytime soon.

Bloomberg reports on Nvidia's board’s investigation into Jensen Huang’s relationship with Alice Huang and the succession vacuum at the chip company.

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