Two investigations for one boss. Donald Trump declared Monday from the White House that the FBI is “looking into” the Jensen Huang file, while assuring that the boss of Nvidia told him he had “absolutely no idea” that his mistress was a suspected spy. The stock lost 4.3% in a session where the Nasdaq gained 2.75%.
This addition follows our article from Monday morning on the internal investigation opened by the board of directors. Since then, Trump has spoken and Wall Street has decided. Google took the opportunity to release two chips on the same day.
Key Points
The American president supports the leader of Nvidia and confirms in the same sentence that a federal investigation is underway.
The stock opened down 5% and closed -4.3% as indices rebounded.
Google unveiled the 8tx and 8i Max TPUs, designed for AI agents, at a time when its rival is weakened.
Jensen Huang 'very honorable' for Trump, but the FBI is on the case
Questioned Monday during a press briefing, Donald Trump first recounted his exchange with the founder of Nvidia. “He told me that he had absolutely no idea that the person in question was a spy,” the president reported, before adding: “I just think he is a very honorable man. » Then the sentence that counts, taken up by the Associated Press: “I know the FBI is looking into it, for another aspect, and I think it will come out well. » An FBI investigation is therefore added to that of the board of directors, without the White House specifying its scope.
The woman at the center of the affair is Alice Huang, former manager of Megaspeed International, a computing capacity rental company based in Singapore and a major buyer of Nvidia chips. The New York Times writes that American intelligence has identified her as an asset of Chinese services. Nvidia repeats that suspicions of chip diversion by Megaspeed to China have been “thoroughly investigated and refuted.” Beijing denies everything. “The so-called Chinese spy allegation is not substantiated,” replied Chinese diplomatic spokesperson Guo Jiakun.
Nvidia's board wrote Sunday that it has "no reason to believe" that company secrets or national security were compromised. Jensen Huang holds 3.6% of the capital and remains the fifth shareholder, without majority voting control. Michael Monaghan, manager of the Founders 100 ETF, considers his ouster “highly unlikely”. Trump is due to meet Xi Jinping next week in Shenzhen for the APEC summit and has not said whether he will broach the subject.
Nvidia loses 4.3%, Google releases two TPUs for the agent era
The stock opened down almost 5% before limiting the decline to -4.3% at the close. The rest of the coast did without him. The Nasdaq recovered 2.75% and AMD jumped more than 10% at the start of the session on a new agreement with Google. Nvidia is worth $4.5 trillion, so a day at -4% wipes out nearly $200 billion in capitalization.
The same Monday at 2 p.m. Paris time, Google presented the last two systems of its eighth generation of in-house chips. The TPU 8tx targets confidential inference, with fifth generation AMD EPYC hosts and an announced latency twice as low as the TPU 8t. The 8i Max TPU assembles two 8i chips in a single package to double the compute, SRAM and memory bandwidth in the same rack footprint. Amin Vahdat, head of Google's AI infrastructure, claims "nearly 100 clients" on these TPUs. No availability date or price.
The business message is clear for companies building autonomous agents. Google sells four specialized systems, one per stage of an agent's life cycle, while Nvidia sells a single architecture and a pattern under investigation.
