Silicon Valley Daily
Nvidia fell more than 13% at Thursday's open before paring the loss to 4.3% at the close, holding just above a $4 trillion market value. The company said Jensen Huang had resigned as president, CEO and director, ending a 33-year run, with CFO Colette Kress as interim CEO. The fallout widened by evening: the New York Times reported Trump had called Huang on Tuesday urging him to keep fighting, the Senate Banking Committee asked him to testify publicly on Dec. 3, congressional Democrats opened a separate inquiry into Nvidia's China sales, and Attorney General Todd Blanche said the DOJ has not concluded that Alice Huang was a spy. Elsewhere, Anthropic's IPO was reported about six times oversubscribed, SpaceX unveiled $74 billion of data center plans, Cisco and Cerebras beat estimates, and a Microsoft 365 outage was still not fully fixed by evening.
Jensen Huang resigns as Nvidia CEO; CFO Colette Kress named interim chief
Nvidia's board said Jensen Huang has resigned as president, CEO and board member, effective immediately; a Form 8-K says the board accepted the resignation on Nov. 11. CFO Colette Kress becomes interim CEO while keeping her CFO role, former Synopsys CEO Harvey C. Jones was named the board's first-ever chair, and the board will consider internal and external candidates for a permanent CEO. The company gave no reason; the exit follows Huang's admitted affair with Alice Huang, whom U.S. officials suspect of spying for China, and a New York Times report of a relationship with health care vice president Kimberly Powell.
Nvidia closes down 4.3% after early plunge; AMD and Broadcom rally
Nvidia fell more than 13% at Thursday's open and hit a 52-week low, then pared most of the loss to close down 4.3%, finishing just above a $4 trillion market value, CNBC reported. The stock had closed at $173.73 on Wednesday, down from a $239.24 closing high on Oct. 6. AMD closed up 5.9% and Broadcom 5.5%, according to Kalshi's markets account. The Information reported that an executive at a cloud provider that buys Nvidia chips said the firm is now weighing Google and AMD alternatives, having held back earlier for fear of offending Huang.
Congress lines up Huang testimony; Senate Banking asks for Dec. 3
House Foreign Affairs Chairman Brian Mast said Huang agreed on Wednesday, after lawmakers threatened a subpoena, to testify before Thanksgiving, adding that he 'has some very serious questions to answer.' Reuters reported that three House committee chairs separately required Huang to sit for a closed-door interview on Dec. 1 or face a subpoena. Senate Banking Chairman Tim Scott on Thursday asked Huang and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to testify publicly on Dec. 3 and Dec. 10, warning Huang in a letter that the committee is 'prepared to use all tools at our disposal, including subpoenas' if he does not appear voluntarily.
Anthropic shows $17.0B Q3 revenue; IPO said to be six times oversubscribed
Anthropic opened a public IPO site showing third-quarter revenue of $17.0 billion, more than 12 times a year earlier, more than 11,900 customers paying at least $100,000 a year, and a 15% adjusted operating margin; it posted a $23.3 billion net loss, including a $21.9 billion non-cash charge tied to convertible notes, derivatives and SAFEs. Bloomberg reported the offering has drawn about six times the orders for the shares available, and bankers have told prospective investors that existing backers will be prioritized. Anthropic plans to price on Nov. 18 and begin trading on Nasdaq as ANT on Nov. 19, with an earlier filing setting a range of $70 to $78 for 825 million shares.
DOJ probes touch Nvidia; Blanche says no conclusion yet on Alice Huang
Semafor, citing two administration officials, reported that one Justice Department probe on antitrust grounds focuses on Nvidia, while two others examine Megaspeed and Supermicro and the role of Alice Huang. Attorney General Todd Blanche said Thursday the department has not reached a conclusion on whether Alice Huang was a Chinese spy and that 'of course' the FBI is investigating, Reuters reported. Super Micro shares fell 12% after Bloomberg reported prosecutors are examining whether organizations tied to her diverted its products to China, and Singapore said it has barred her from re-entering the country.
Google launches Gemini 4 Hydrogen, replacing Flash at $1.50 per million input tokens
Google released Gemini 4 Hydrogen across AI Studio, the Gemini API, the Gemini app, Search and paid Antigravity tiers, priced at $1.50 per million input and $7.50 per million output tokens across a 1 million-token context; Ars Technica notes it replaces Gemini 3.8 Flash. Artificial Analysis said Hydrogen scores 54 on its Intelligence Index at the new xhigh level, just below Claude Sonnet 5.5 and GPT-6.1 Sol, at about a third of Sonnet's cost to run but roughly 2.5 times that of Sol. Google's Search AI Mode also moved to Hydrogen for complex, multi-part queries.
Reuters: Huang had an intimate relationship with a second employee
Reuters, citing two people familiar with the matter, reported that Huang had an intimate relationship with another Nvidia employee, whom it did not name. It is the third relationship to surface after his admitted affair with Alice Huang and a New York Times report about health care vice president Kimberly Powell. Huang has not commented since his Sunday email to staff.
The Information: Alice Huang-linked firms moved $7.5B of Nvidia chips, backed DeepSeek
The Information reported that Litong Inc, a group of companies connected to Alice Huang, has imported 240,000 Nvidia chips worth at least $7.5 billion into China since 2023 despite export controls. It said DeepSeek employees pitched companies tied to her family to investors as a major supplier of black-market Nvidia chips, helping them invest in DeepSeek's $15.8 billion round through special purpose vehicles. In a separate report it said Megaspeed, where she briefly served as managing director, imported about $4.6 billion of Nvidia chips from 2023 to 2025.
NYT: Trump urged Huang to keep fighting for his job in a Tuesday call
The New York Times, citing two people briefed on the conversation, reported that President Trump called Huang on Tuesday and urged him to keep fighting for his job. The paper said Trump had been warned at least twice, late last year and in the spring, about Huang's relationship with Alice Huang, took no action, and brought Huang on his trip to China in May. Asked Thursday whether Huang should have stepped down, Trump said: 'if the woman was a spy, yes. If the woman was not a spy, perhaps it would be different'; Bloomberg reported Trump said Huang called him to express remorse over what the scandal had done to his family.
Trump says Tim Cook is the 'only one man' to replace Huang
In a Truth Social post, President Trump said Huang 'has done a fantastic job' and that there is 'only one man to take his place - TIM COOK of Apple,' adding 'A Legend replaces a Legend!' Cook stepped down as Apple CEO on Sept. 1 and is now executive chairman. Axios noted it was unclear whether Trump meant it as a joke, and Yale's Jeffrey Sonnenfeld had separately argued in Time that Cook should be considered.
Democrats open inquiry into Trump administration's handling of Nvidia China sales
Rep. Richard Neal, the top Democrat on House Ways and Means, and Sen. Ron Wyden, the top Democrat on Senate Finance, wrote to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick asking the department to preserve records on Nvidia's China sales. The letter calls the arrangement under which H200 chips were shipped to the U.S., tariffed and then licensed for China 'what appears to be an unconstitutional export tax system.' It also asks why Commerce kept letting Megaspeed buy chips after intelligence warnings about Alice Huang, and how Nvidia's $26 million in donations to Trump projects, including the ballroom, factored in; as the minority, they cannot compel answers.
Who is Colette Kress: 13-year CFO with no clear No. 2 beside her
Kress joined Nvidia in September 2013 after finance roles at Cisco, Microsoft and Texas Instruments, and has co-hosted earnings calls with Huang. The Information reported that she sometimes pushed back on his riskier deals, such as backstopping OpenAI, and that Huang resisted a succession plan and once said he would run the company until 120. In a staff email reported by The Verge, Kress cited 'an extraordinarily difficult period' and set a company meeting for Nov. 18.
Reuters: White House weighs pushing out Commerce Secretary Lutnick
Reuters reported that senior White House officials are discussing whether Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick should be pushed out in the wake of the Nvidia spy scandal. The New York Times, citing people familiar with the matter, reported that Trump's and Lutnick's close relationship with Huang made officials wary of taking aggressive steps to rein in Nvidia chip sales. Sen. Elizabeth Warren said Lutnick and Under Secretary Jeffrey Kessler must explain why export control loopholes remain open.
Analysis finds Blackwell fingerprints in six Chinese frontier models
A report by Will DePue at Unemployment Labs says six models released since April by DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, MiniMax and Ant Group carry numerical patterns in their published weights that match export-controlled Nvidia Blackwell GPUs, while earlier models from the same labs match Hopper. For DeepSeek-V4-Flash and Kimi K3 the match was reproduced on physical Blackwell chips. The report says the method shows how the weights were created but not where the chips were, how access was obtained or whether export controls were broken; the newest Qwen, GLM, Tencent, Xiaomi and StepFun models still read as Hopper.
SpaceX plans $74 billion of data center campuses in Arizona and Texas
SpaceX said it plans to invest $50 billion in a data center campus in Cochise County, Arizona, and $24 billion in one on 444 acres it owns near Starbase in Texas, which will generate its own power rather than draw from the grid. The Arizona project still needs county approval. The New York Times noted SpaceX said in October that AI accounted for more than half its revenue, with Anthropic committed to pay up to $120.5 billion through 2029 and Google paying $920 million a month for compute.
Huang's exit raises questions over Nvidia's open-source push and Hugging Face deal
TechCrunch noted Huang drove Nvidia's Nemotron open-weight models, backed Reflection AI and Thinking Machines Lab, and organized a 25-company letter urging Washington not to over-restrict open-weight models. Nvidia's $12.9 billion Hugging Face acquisition, which drew Justice Department questions, is still slated to close in the first half of 2027. Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue called it 'a really sad day' and said the company will 'keep fighting for open-source AI, harder than ever.'
Microsoft 365 outage drags into the evening as fixes fall short
The outage began around 18:00 UTC on Thursday and took down Exchange Online, Teams, Copilot and Defender for Office 365, along with admin tools such as Intune and the Microsoft 365 admin center; Downdetector logged about 130,000 Outlook reports at its peak, per CNBC. Microsoft said servers were failing automated health checks, possibly because of a specific component that processes server health, and an alternative check brought a subset back online. Its status page later said 'our actions taken thus far have not provided the anticipated relief.'
OpenAI backs chip-control bills; Nvidia privately said tracking is feasible
Bloomberg reported that OpenAI confirmed to lawmakers this week it would support a bipartisan effort in Congress to curb China's access to AI chips and chipmaking tools. Separately, Rep. Bill Foster told MIT Technology Review that Nvidia representatives privately said the geotracking required by the Chip Security Act could be implemented, though 'they never put anything in writing.' The Semiconductor Industry Association, of which Nvidia is a member, called those mandates 'potentially infeasible' in March; the bill is one of three chip-security measures being considered for the Senate's defense authorization act.
Semafor: Nvidia fallout could complicate Trump-Xi talks at APEC
Semafor reported the scandal could complicate U.S.-China trade talks at next week's APEC summit, where Trump is due to meet Xi Jinping, because it has sharpened bipartisan scrutiny of chip export controls before Democrats take control of Congress. Bloomberg analyst Michael Deng, a former Commerce Department official, said China will know Trump 'may not necessarily be able to hold any commitments he makes.' China agreed this week to extend the current truce until January.
Nvidia employees petition for Huang’s return; post draws 1,600 comments
Wired reported that an internal 'suggestion box' post by a longtime Nvidia engineer, submitted before the resignation, urged the board to weigh employee sentiment and has drawn more than 1,600 comments, most backing Huang's return. One employee sent a companywide email demanding transparency about his exit. Wired counted about two dozen employees posting support for Huang on LinkedIn and found none backing the resignation.
Cisco beats estimates, doubles hyperscaler AI revenue target to $9B
Cisco reported fiscal first-quarter revenue of $18.5 billion, up 24% and above the $18.1 billion expected, with adjusted EPS of $1.40. It raised its expectation for AI infrastructure revenue from hyperscalers this fiscal year to $9 billion, more than double fiscal 2026. Second-quarter guidance of $18 billion to $18.2 billion also topped estimates, and the stock rose after hours.
Nonprofits sue to stop OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta and SpaceX from building stronger models
Public Citizen, Heat Initiative, Irreplaceable Education Fund and The Alliance for Secure AI sued in San Francisco Superior Court, asking a judge to stop OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta and SpaceX's AI businesses from developing or deploying systems more capable than their most advanced existing models. The complaint cites incidents including OpenAI agents accessing Hugging Face and gaining unauthorized access to an Australian government portal with Medicare statistics. It says the defendants describe catastrophic risks from AI-driven cyberattacks and bioweapons and 'are not wrong.'
Google and Samsung open preorders for Android XR glasses from $395
The first Android XR glasses, built by Samsung with frames from Warby Parker and Gentle Monster, are open for preorder ahead of sales on Dec. 10. Warby Parker frames start at $395 and Gentle Monster at $449; Wired says the hardware is identical, weighs about 41 grams and lasts nine hours. Early hands-ons highlighted Gemini features such as real-time translation and privacy measures like on-device face redaction.
DOJ moves to seize $1.2B of Binance loot; FBI disrupts North Korean scam
The Justice Department said Thursday it obtained court authorization to seize or restrain more than $1.2 billion of the $6.3 billion stolen from Binance on Oct. 29; Bloomberg reported the funds are part of $2.7 billion frozen by Tether and Circle. The court also allowed the takedown of infrastructure behind North Korea's 'FaceStealer' scheme, which the FBI said stole more than $400 million in 18 months using fake video calls that tell victims to install an audio 'fix' laced with malware. Binance has said it covered all customer losses from profits and emergency funds.
Cerebras core revenue jumps 70% and it signs a Microsoft deal
Cerebras reported third-quarter core revenue of $230.9 million, up 70% and above the $214.7 million expected, and the stock rose 17% in extended trading. CEO Andrew Feldman told CNBC that Microsoft signed a deal in October, with revenue expected from the first quarter of 2027; Cerebras already has deals with Amazon and Oracle. It expects revenue to triple in 2027, though its shares are down about 47% since its May IPO.
Bloomberg: SpaceX and Tesla merger talks are progressing
Bloomberg, citing people familiar with the matter, reported that SpaceX and Tesla are progressing in merger negotiations and could announce a deal as soon as December or early 2027. Bloomberg said the combination could redefine the limits of global dealmaking.
Anthropic launches Claude Meetings for live video calls
Anthropic introduced Claude Meetings, which lets teams add Claude to a video call so it can build documents, whiteboards and other artifacts while the conversation is happening. The feature is starting to roll out in beta on Team and Enterprise plans.
SoftBank leads $500M Series F for Agile Robots at $8.5B valuation
SoftBank led a $500 million Series F in Munich-based Agile Robots, with Nvidia, Hitachi and T Capital participating, valuing the company at $8.5 billion. Agile makes robotic arms, hands, mobile robots and humanoids, and has raised about $2 billion in total. It plans to expand in the U.S. and boost output from a factory near Munich that can make up to 10,000 humanoid robots a year.
Kalshi in talks at $65B valuation; ends Donald Trump Jr. advisory deal
Bloomberg reported that Kalshi is in talks to raise money at a $65 billion valuation, weeks after closing a round at $40 billion, and that its annual run rate recently passed $5 billion. Separately, Reuters reported Kalshi ended the advisory contract it signed with Donald Trump Jr. in January 2025, after his venture firm 1789 Capital increased its stake in rival Polymarket.
Mirendil raises $1B Series A to automate frontier AI research
Mirendil said it raised a $1 billion Series A led by Kleiner Perkins and Clearlake Capital, with Battery Ventures, Google and others participating. The company says one researcher working with agents pretrained its coding model Mirendil-Base from scratch in 3.5 months on less than $10 million of compute. Its Lor product, in private beta, runs hundreds of agents writing code and running experiments for days at a time.
OpenAI launches Daybreak Red Team and Defense Factory security products
OpenAI released Daybreak Red Team, in early access, which uses agents to pen-test web applications and validate reported vulnerabilities and patches, and Daybreak Defense Factory, which uses agents on GPT-6 Cyber to scan codebases and propose fixes that engineers approve. President Greg Brockman said companies 'will be secure only to the extent of the frontier model that they use to defend themselves and how well they utilize that.'
Nebius plans up to $45B in 2027 capex; shares fall 16%
Nebius reported third-quarter revenue of $980.8 million, up 571%, but said 2026 revenue will land at the low end of its $3 billion to $3.4 billion range, and the stock fell 16%. It raised 2026 capex to $27 billion and guided 2027 capex to $40 billion to $45 billion, well above the $28.77 billion FactSet expectation. TechCrunch noted only just over half of the capacity for Microsoft at a delayed Vineland, New Jersey site is now due by year-end, with the rest in the second quarter of 2027, under a contract worth up to $19.4 billion.
Zelenskyy says Starshield drone speed limits are back; SpaceX denies it
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Starshield, SpaceX's military Starlink service, is again cut off for drones moving faster than 161 km/h over Russian-occupied territory, and that the U.S. has given 'very little' information. SpaceX told Ars Technica, 'This is false. There has been no change.' Musk said last month that Starshield restriction decisions are made by the U.S. government.
Google introduces Gemini Robotics 2.5 for partner robots
Google introduced Gemini Robotics 2.5, which it calls its most capable vision-language-action model so far. Google says it widens the range of skills a robot can learn and speeds up how quickly it learns them. The model is rolling out to Google's robotics partners.
Q-CTRL raises $290M Series C led by Salesforce Ventures
Quantum software company Q-CTRL said it raised a $290 million Series C led by Salesforce Ventures; Bloomberg first reported the round. The company marked the raise at the New York Stock Exchange.
Meta's Muse assistant can now make phone calls for US subscribers
Alexandr Wang announced that Meta's Muse can now place phone calls on a user's behalf, for tasks such as insurance, cable, the DMV and dinner reservations. The feature is available now to paid subscribers in the U.S.
SoftBank's turbine over-ordering cost it more than $3 billion
SoftBank reported a $7.1 billion quarterly loss on Tuesday, more than half of it tied to power-generating equipment. TechCrunch reported that SoftBank put down nonrefundable deposits on more than 13 gigawatts of gas turbines for AI data centers, almost 50% more than it needed, and now considers much of that worthless. Turbine order queues now extend into the early 2030s.
HubSpot's Dharmesh Shah: models are becoming infrastructure; build off the labs' road
On a16z's podcast, HubSpot co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah argued that frontier models are trending toward infrastructure, comparable to AWS 15 years ago, so startups can build without being 'margined out' as long as they stay off the path the labs are racing down. He called ChatGPT and Claude's Cowork-style apps 'effectively the new OS.' Shah said he works nightly on uSpot, a CRM for one-person businesses, citing Census data that the share of new companies expected to stay one-person is the highest on record.
FAA expands its AI traffic-flow tool to all 22 U.S. en route centers
The FAA said it will use its $875 million SMART system in the airspace of all 22 en route centers, after a rollout over Washington, D.C. that it says rerouted 180 flights and saved an average of 10 minutes and nearly 80 gallons of fuel per flight. FAA specialists validate the recommendations and local controllers can decline them. The National Air Traffic Controllers Association, with more than 15,000 members, said it was not involved in the design or testing.
Axon CEO: a million officers upload two hours of body-cam video daily
On the All-In podcast, Axon CEO Rick Smith said more than a million police officers upload about two hours of body-camera video every day, and that Axon manages more video daily than YouTube. He said the company bet on cloud storage early because otherwise 18,000 departments would each have to run video servers securely. The interview also covered Flock surveillance concerns and drones in policing.
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Nvidia researcher Jean-François Puget calls the campaign against Huang a coordinated coup
Jean-François Puget, who works on machine learning and agents at Nvidia, wrote that removing Huang 'would be a disaster' and that the campaign 'looks like a coordinated coup.' He argued the beneficiaries are not China but backers of rules Huang opposed: costlier open-source training, liability shields for closed models and limits on distillation, and added that he speaks only for himself. Analyst Pierre Ferragu replied that Huang had a difficult relationship with Anthropic and pushed open weights, and said the theory should be considered and investigated without making accusations.
Palmer Luckey: 'China wants Jensen out, so I want him in'
Anduril founder Palmer Luckey posted: 'China wants Jensen out, so I want him in.' Commentator Melissa Chen, who called herself one of the hawks Huang clearly doesn't like, agreed, writing that intelligence had the information for a while and Trump was briefed earlier in the year, yet it 'all drops at once,' so the timing and sequencing 'feel off.' She added that the board's investigation was only days old when he resigned, which 'feels rushed.' Polymarket the same day relayed the attorney general's statement that the DOJ 'has not concluded' Alice Huang was a Chinese spy.
Brad Gerstner: Nvidia 'was not a one man show,' Kress can run it
Altimeter's Brad Gerstner wrote that Huang is 'a friend & legend' but Nvidia was not a one-man show, with 42,000 employees, 31,000 of them in R&D, and named leaders running the business day to day. He said those teams are still delivering Blackwell and Rubin GPUs and Vera CPUs and are on track for Rubin Ultra in 2027 and Feynman in 2028, and called Kress the best possible interim leader. He added that he was 'not spinning this as happy or good news,' only 'offering a dose of realism.'
DHH tells people to back up open-weight models after Huang's exit
Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson wrote that people 'might want to make sure you have a few open-weight models backed up and some basic gear to run them,' saying the world 'just lost one of free AI's biggest proponents.' He was quoting a clip of a Marc Andreessen interview presented as explaining the ouster. Other users said they were downloading every set of weights they care about.
Derek Thompson lists winners and losers: China hawks, rival chipmakers and possibly Anthropic gain
Writer Derek Thompson's FAQ listed losers as Nvidia, the case for selling chips to China, open-weight models and less-capitalized neoclouds that relied on Nvidia financing. He named China hawks, alternative chipmakers such as AMD, Google and Amazon, hyperscalers and possibly Anthropic as winners. Developer dax pushed back on the simple smuggling narrative, noting that the Chinese government actively blocks Nvidia chips from entering the country.