Jensen Huang’s fall further exposes EU leaders on AI

BRUSSELS — It takes an 80-year-old German diplomat to put the Jensen Huang spy scandal in proper historical context. Asked about allegations that the Nvidia CEO was lured into an intimate relationship with a Chinese spy, Wolfgang Ischinger, Germany’s former ambassador to Washington, pointed to the past.

“In World War I, you had female spies who used the honey trap to talk to a general, and maybe sleep with him and extract some secrets,” he told POLITICO. As Europe’s 27 leaders meet for their first conversation on AI the day after Huang’s resignation, his fall from grace is a reminder that it’s American tech bros — not European military men — who now hold the secrets that can decide the fate of the world.

Friday’s roundtable of European leaders in Dublin must reckon with the reality that the pursuit of AI superiority remains a two-horse race between the U.S. and China — and that Nvidia’s leadership drama doesn’t change the fact that a single American company’s chips will continue to drive the artificial intelligence boom.