Do we like them?

Do we like Jensen Huang?

Our score: 6 out of 10. Decent record and real generosity, but a contested China chips push, a Trump ballroom donation and a fresh unproven spy story keep it middling.

Huang is the engineer who built Nvidia into the company supplying the chips behind the AI boom. He's also an Oregon State graduate, and he and his wife have given his old uni serious money. Fortune notes he mostly dodges the heat that lands on other AI bosses, because Nvidia sells the picks and shovels rather than the chatbots.

The fresh mess is the spy story. The New York Times reported that US intelligence officials allege Alice Huang, an executive at Megaspeed in Singapore, was passing information to Chinese officials, and that she had a close relationship with Jensen Huang. Nvidia says he talks to thousands of customer executives a year and the contact was not unusual. China's Foreign Ministry called the reports baseless. Nobody has charged him with anything, and ABC relayed the claims without verifying them.

The bigger ongoing stoush is China. Huang has lobbied Washington for over a year to loosen chip export rules so Nvidia can sell H200 chips there, and he turned up on Trump's Beijing trip after a last-minute call. Critics like the Council on Foreign Relations' Chris McGuire argue it would help China close the AI gap. Huang argues spreading US tech outweighs the risks, so where you land depends on whether you read it as business or national security.

On the harm check: no anti-LGBTQ, anti-women or anti-migrant words from him turned up in the sources we read, so that's a gap rather than a clean bill. He told reporters he was “incredibly proud and delighted to help contribute in a small way” to Trump's White House ballroom. He's also written off AI-jobs warnings from other tech bosses as a “God complex”, and said AI would use “a lot less energy”, a claim climate groups contest.

So the verdict: no pattern of mistreating people, nothing hateful on the record, and a lot of good done through education. The asterisk is for the politics of the company, the cosy Trump ties and the China chips fight. The spy story is allegation only, so we're leaving it as that until something firmer lands.