What happens to the AI industry if Nvidia falters

Finshots examines Nvidia's exposure after reports that CEO Jensen Huang had a relationship with Alice Huang, a businesswoman allegedly linked to Chinese intelligence and to Megaspeed International, a partner accused of diverting restricted H100, H200 and A100 chips worth at least $7.5 billion into China; Nvidia's independent directors appointed former acting US attorney Joon H. Kim to investigate whether a foreign intelligence operation targeted Huang. The piece weighs whether Huang, who holds about 3.5% of shares with no special voting rights and has led the company for over three decades without formal succession planning, could be replaced, and notes Nvidia's roughly $99 billion in equity investments, $25 billion in investment commitments, $279 billion in supply and capacity commitments, $29 billion in cloud-service agreements and up to $105 billion in guarantees for an Ohio data-centre project expected to serve OpenAI. It asks what a prolonged leadership crisis, tighter export restrictions or supply-chain disruption would mean for AI startups, cloud providers and data-centre operators, especially as China turns to Huawei, models like DeepSeek's R1 reduce hardware needs, and AMD and Broadcom draw more interest.