The Nvidia affair what exactly are we making fun of

November 15, 2026Over the past week or so, an entire meme industry has popped up around Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and his ‘indiscretions’.

He has been ‘caught’ at that now-infamous Coldplay concert, has lip-synced and danced in multiple Bollywood romantic numbers, and has replayed nearly every iconic moment in viral history on every Tik. Tok and Instagram feed.

I am enjoying this, I admit, perhaps more than I should. The irony is clear as day to everyone, from news and entertainment platforms to netizens at large: the hyperrealistic clips have been generated using AI, powered for the most part by Nvidia’s own chips.

The man who supplies the technofeudal industry with its engines has become raw material for its cheapest jokes.

The story behind the viral storm, so far at least, goes as follows:On October 29, the New York Times reported that US intelligence officials had concluded that Alice Huang, a top executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore-based data-centre company and Nvidia customer, was a Chinese intelligence asset funnelling information to Beijing.

Megaspeed is under scrutiny for possibly steering advanced Nvidia AI chips to China. The report also said that surveillance of the executive, who is also known as Huang Le and is a Chinese citizen, revealed a close relationship with Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive.

They are not related but the shared surname has been a gift to headline writers. On November 8, Huang been “unfaithful” to his wife, naming no one, and the board hired the law firm Wachtell Lipton to investigate.

On Wednesday the Times reported a second relationship, with Kimberly Powell, a vice president who reported to him. On Thursday Reuters reported a third. Huang has confirmed neither, but on Thursday morning he resigned after 33 years, and Nvidia finance chief, Colette Kress, became interim CEO.

Shares closed down 4.3 per cent at $166.19 that day, almost $500 billion lighter than a week earlier. Only two items in that chronology come from Huang himself: infidelity and his exit. The spy claim rests on unnamed American officials; Beijing calls it groundless and no charges against either Huang have been reported.

Nvidia says it has no reason to believe national security was compromised, US President Donald Trump has said it is unclear whether Alice was a spy at all, and US Attorney General Todd Blanche says the Department of Justice has reached no conclusion on her alleged China links.

None of these technical details, however, have slowed the Internet, which simply filled the gaps. Why does it feel so good? Because Huang is no incidental billionaire.

He is the face of the technology that a great many people have been told, in the politest possible terms, to “get used to”.

This is the man whose advice to workers frightened of AI, as Fortune headlined it, was that they were confusing their jobs with the tools they use; who has sketched a future of 100 AI workers for every human.

When someone in that position is undone by something as old as adultery and as quaint and ‘classic’ as a restaurant photograph, the pleasure is not hard to explain. Even his defence squad has an air of farce.

Elon Musk replied that hiring him would be “an honor”, Bill Ackman urged the public to back an “incredible human”, and research cited by the Washington Post suggested many of the cheering posts were fake. Billionaires, defended by bots.

There is a second, less comfortable source of satisfaction. For years, the rest of us have been nudged into accepting that our data, our faces, our likenesses and the products of our digital labour are not really ours, scraped to train models, monetised by platforms, and shrugged off whenever anyone objects.

Women in particular have watched their photos turned into deepfakes, and ordinary people have seen a single image or moment become a meme that follows them around, with real costs to their reputations and their mental health.

So when the face being lifted, remixed and mocked belongs to one of the men who profit most from that machinery, it feels, for once, like the bill arriving at the right address. Resentment of the technology elite is deserved, and in our current age of all-pervasive pessimism and injustice, ridicule of the powerful is the only comeuppance we have.

My quarrel is with what some of the laughter is made of. On November 9, The Economist ran “Two Huangs don’t make a right” under the headline “Jensen Huang is caught with his pants down”; the New York Post, by one account, put “HUANG HUANG BANG BANG” across its front page.

The Asian American Journalists Association objected that turning a common Asian surname into a punchline in an espionage story reinforces links between identity, suspicion and divided loyalty. One of those publications is a tabloid and the other prides itself on a polite liberalism, which is rather the point: the pun does not check a masthead’s politics.

You laugh a half-second before you think. Then there is the vocabulary. “Honeytrap” and “honeypot” have been everywhere, from CNN to the Spectator to the Wall Street Journal.

The business news magazine Fast Company traced the figure of the scheming Asian seductress back through the ‘Dragon Lady’ trope to the Page Act of 1875, enforced on the presumption that women immigrating from East Asia were prostitutes. Alice Huang, as reported, is a former state-television reporter turned finance executive.

In meme form she is a “Chinese model”, a pun on the AI kind. A woman with a career becomes a prop with a plot function. Dave Lu, who runs a non-profit fighting discrimination against Asian Americans, portray Asian-American women as honeypots and spies across the internet.

He was not describing one woman. He was describing what happens to anyone who shares her ethnic features. The logic travels fast.

On November 10 a post on X set photographs of Brian Armstrong, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg and Huang side by side, inviting readers to notice that their wives are Chinese or of Chinese descent,.

I cannot confirm the politics of whoever posted it, and suspicion of this kind is nobody’s property: House Republicans demanded Huang’s testimony, and Chuck Schumer demanded answers too. But innuendo about spouses has never needed a party.

It needs a surname and a photograph. The jokes about Huang himself are subtler. The surname is the punchline, the leather jacket the costume, and the plot is a brilliant Asian engineer who is either too naive to see the trap or too unlikely a lothario to be taken seriously.

These are old roles. East Asian men have long been written as nerds and as sexless in Western pop culture, men who can be outwitted but not desired. Consider how the story might have been the photograph been white.

The Wall Street Journal reported in 2022 that Musk had a brief affair with Sergey Brin’s wife; he called it “total bs”. He also fathered twins with a Neuralink executive and joked that he was helping with the “underpopulation crisis”.

Those were stories about friendship, betrayal and appetite. Few asked whose flag the bedroom was flying. Newsweek did call sex Silicon Valley’s “critical security flaw”, an industry-wide trait.

Yet for Huang a second question sits beneath the first: whose side are you on? He did everything immigrants are. By his own well- at a Kentucky boarding school as a child, then built the world’s most valuable company, was tapped for Trump’s tech advisory council, and was called “an honorable guy” by the president as the scandal broke.

Kash Patel and Vivek Ramaswamy know how far that kind of loyalty goes. Patel 2025 that he had been called a racist slur and to be in the country; after his Diwali greeting last October, a pastor and podcaster “go back home”.

Ramaswamy, fluent in his party’s grievances and rhetoric, was was “not an American”. Devotion bought them offices and platforms. It did not buy belonging.

Nor, it turns out, does a company worth trillions. If you are a person of colour in a Western country, especially one who votes left, the language should be familiar: asked where you are really from,, watching one man’s lapse become your community’s burden.

I cannot say which tribe tells which joke; these memes travel from New York to Shanghai to Karachi and carry no party card. Nobody needs to mourn a billionaire, but a stereotype released freely against someone easy to dislike does not check ID before landing on the next person.

And then there is Jensen’s wife, Lori Huang. Lori Mills met Jensen as his engineering lab partner at Oregon State; they married in 1985. She is co-trustee of the family trusts that hold hundreds of millions of Nvidia shares, and her name is on a building at her alma mater.

She has said nothing in public. Still, hundreds of commenters, many of them fake, posted photos comparing her looks to Alice Huang’s, the subtext being that a wife whom the public at large deems not conventionally attractive enough makes an affair understandable.

The sympathetic versions are only a degree kinder: the wronged wife, the loyal partner, defined only by what was done to her. None of this is an argument for pity. Huang broke a vow by his own admission; whether he broke more than that, a board, a law firm and Congress will determine.

The case against the men building the future on everyone else’s behalf at their expense stays necessary, and no less so because some of the punchlines are borrowed from the nineteenth century. So go on laughing.

But ask, now and then, what the laugh is made of. Is it the hypocrisy of a man who to adapt while failing to adapt himself? The wealth that cushions him?

Or a century of other people’s ideas about what Asian men are, what Asian women are for, and whom either can be trusted with? The Internet will not keep those apart for us. What exactly are we making fun of?

The writer is a freelance journalist and media scholar who writes about politics, security, technology and media narratives. All facts and information are the sole responsibility of the author. Pages.

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