The Jensen Huang Scandal Has Shocked Even Scandal-Prone Silicon Valley

Artificial intelligence promises transcendence. We will ditch our tired and inefficient bodies, say farewell to tedious work and trips to the grocery store. The computer will tend to all human needs and solve all human problems.

Well, that was the idea. A.I. was supposed to achieve a new level of reality this month with the public sale of shares of Anthropic, one of the two start-ups that have created and defined this young industry. A trillion-dollar company will be born, yielding billionaires galore.

A.I. is the biggest Silicon Valley story ever. But last Sunday it was suddenly pushed aside when the chief executive of the company whose chips are literally powering this intelligence revolution confessed to cheating on his wife with a woman, Alice Huang, who U.S. officials believe was spying for China. By Thursday morning he had resigned, something few thought possible just days earlier.

The scandal that took down Nvidia chief Jensen Huang is full of implications for national security and the global A.I. boom. Mr. Huang ranked among Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk and Bill Gates as tech leaders who were considered by the world to be inseparable from the companies they built.

In Silicon Valley, people were mostly just stunned by the news. Those who have been around for a long time, and seen the stretch of territory south of San Francisco evolve from hardware manufacturing to software development to the dot-com frenzy and now the A.I. boom, said they had never seen anything like it.

Tech veterans have witnessed amazing ascensions and equally abrupt falls. They have seen abundant arrogance. Fortunes made and fortunes lost in an instant. But there’s something that stands out this time: Transcendence was never supposed to be tawdry.