AI’s Long List of Problems Just Got a Whole Lot Worse

Jensen Huang resigned as president and CEO of Nvidia this morning, leaving behind a pile of questions that promise to get even messier than the zoning fights over the data centers his chips helped turn into the most unwelcome neighbors in America.

Despite still having President Donald Trump’s ardent support, Huang resigned after two extramarital affairs came to light. One was with a woman who was later identified as a possible Chinese spy. The other was with a vice president at Nvidia. The company’s board said in a statement announcing the resignation that Huang will be replaced by its CFO, Colette Kress, who will serve as CEO on an interim basis. With no clear succession plan in place and Huang, as its founder and de facto face, still under significant scrutiny, there’s real concern that Nvidia’s value could collapse and take a huge portion of the American economy along with it.

But Nvidia’s troubles are only the latest sign that the AI boom has become as much a political problem as a business one. And in Washington and statehouses across the country, the fallout has been piling up for months.

The problem is simple: People hate the data centers used to power AI, despite the tech industry’s attempts to rebrand them. They’re bad for the environment and make people sick. The politics surrounding them have become so toxic that opposition to data centers became a key issue in this year’s midterm elections, which saw Republicans get hammered by Democrats everywhere from battle-ground Ohio to deeply red places like Tennessee and Mississippi.

Data center defenders got so desperate that my colleague Sophie Hurwitz even reported an instance in Utah where people who opposed data center construction were branded by a millionaire on Fox News as Chinese spies.

Nvidia can replace its CEO. The industry will have a much harder time replacing the goodwill it has already burned through. But at least the inevitable multi-part documentary series on Nefltix will be awesome.