AI News, Nov 13: Jensen Huang Resigns From Nvidia
The Big Story: Jensen Huang is out at Nvidia
Nvidia said Thursday that Jensen Huang has resigned as president and chief executive, a day after the board accepted his resignation. CFO Colette Kress becomes interim CEO while keeping the CFO job, and Harvey C. Jones, a former Synopsys chief who has sat on the board since 1993, becomes the company’s first-ever board chair.
Shares fell nearly 12% in early trading and touched a 52-week low before closing down 4.3%. Measured from Friday, the stock is off as much as 19% and more than $855 billion in market value.
Then it got worse. Reuters reported a third relationship, with a second Nvidia employee it declined to name, on top of those with accused spy Alice Huang and healthcare VP Kimberly Powell. The Wall Street Journal then reported that Huang had called Kress “a deer in the headlights” at a summer finance presentation, after she pressed him on credit-based guarantees to data center operators, deals involving his son-in-law Nico Caprez. She also cut Nvidia’s commitment to OpenAI’s Ohio data center from a discussed $250 billion credit line to $105 billion.
Inside the company the mood runs the other way. A longtime engineer’s internal suggestion-box post, asking the board to formally poll staff on Huang’s future, drew more than 1,600 comments, most of them wanting him back. The company supplying most of the world’s AI compute reports earnings Tuesday under an interim CEO its founder privately doubted and much of its staff did not ask for.
Four enterprise AI measurements landed Thursday and none found a payoff
VB Intelligence’s October VB Pulse survey found 47% of companies had replaced a production AI model in the past year. Among them, 70% needed a few weeks or more of engineering beyond the swap itself and 36% needed over a month; only 13% called it close to a configuration change. For 45%, the new model did not match or beat the old one, and they either reworked the surrounding application or reverted.
An Avanade-commissioned survey has 77% of business decision-makers saying their organization puts too much of its AI investment into incremental improvements, with only 11% expecting AI to fundamentally change how they operate. American Banker found 13% of banking professionals say their institution redesigns workflows end to end when adopting AI; the rest bolt it onto what exists. Citi is reworking about 100 processes, with no outcome figure attached. And Doximity’s poll of 3,300 physicians has more than half using AI daily, with clinical decision support up to 63% from 37%, yet three in four hit a factual inaccuracy in the past year and more than half name inaccuracies as the reason they have cut back.
Adoption stopped being the hard part some time ago. Keeping it working is the problem now.
Today’s Top Stories
Congress opened two fronts on the Nvidia China deal
Rep. Richard Neal and Sen. Ron Wyden, ranking Democrats on House Ways and Means and Senate Finance, sent Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick a records-preservation letter describing the H200 arrangement, under which Taiwan-made chips bound for China ship to the US first so a tariff can be applied, as “effectively taking a cut of Nvidia’s sales to China through what appears to be an unconstitutional export tax system.” It asks why Megaspeed kept buying after intelligence warnings and whether Nvidia’s $26 million in donations to Trump projects mattered. As the minority they can ask but not compel. Separately, Huang agreed to testify behind closed doors before Thanksgiving.
Google’s cheaper Gemini beat the bigger one above it
Gemini 4 Hydrogen replaces Gemini 3.8 Flash at $1.50 per million input tokens and $7.50 per million output, with a roughly 1M-token window and a new “xhigh” reasoning tier. Google scores it 57% on its own Terminal-Bench 4.1 against 18.2% for Flash. The more interesting number comes from Artificial Analysis: Hydrogen’s Intelligence Index sits a point ahead of the larger Gemini 4 Argon. It also goes into Search, which Google calls its biggest model upgrade to Search yet. A mid-tier model outscoring the tier above it is awkward for the premise that the expensive model is the capable one.
OpenAI raised $15B at $1.25T, half what it wanted
CNBC’s David Faber reported that OpenAI raised $15 billion at a $1.25 trillion valuation, citing sources, against the roughly $30 billion at $1.4 trillion it had planned before pulling back. The same live blog confirmed Anthropic begins trading on Nasdaq on November 19 under the ticker ANT, and that Nvidia will buy another $10 billion of its Class N stock in a private placement immediately after the offering. Nvidia committing that on the morning it lost its CEO says the buildout isn’t waiting for a succession plan.
SpaceX committed $74B to two AI campuses
SpaceX is spending $50 billion in Cochise County, Arizona and $24 billion near Starbase, Texas, where it will build, own and operate a gas-fired power plant rather than wait in an interconnection queue. Arizona gets about 5,500 construction jobs and 1,000 permanent ones. The customer list is the real story: Anthropic is described as SpaceX’s biggest customer at about a third of its revenue, and Google has agreed to pay $920 million a month for computing power. A rocket company became a top-tier cloud by owning its own electricity.
Quick Hits
- Courts: Nonprofits including Public Citizen and the Heat Initiative sued OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta and SpaceX’s AI division in San Francisco to bar further frontier development, citing Dario Amodei’s and Elon Musk’s own warnings about AI destroying civilization.
- Funding: LangChain raised $300 million at a $3 billion valuation led by Alphabet’s CapitalG, with IVP, Sapphire Ventures, GIC and DFJ Growth.
- Products: Anthropic launched Claude Meetings in beta for Team and Enterprise, letting Claude join a Google Meet call to draft documents and whiteboards live; it stays out of calls with outside guests by default.
- Outages: A Microsoft 365 failure that began Thursday afternoon left Copilot Chat unable to load or answer for more than 13 hours and cut it off from email, calendars and files, with Downdetector peaking above 130,000 Outlook reports; Anthropic had a separate two-hour authentication outage Friday morning.
- Security: OpenAI unveiled Daybreak Red Team and Defense Factory at its Cyber at the Frontier event, importing findings from Wiz, Snyk and Endor Labs, with engineers reviewing every patch before merge.
- Publishing: Three near-identical journals sharing one editor-in-chief are publishing AI-generated papers under academics’ names; Stanford’s Jure Leskovec confirmed one was not his, and Gothenburg’s Alan Said watched his reappear under two other authors in two days.
- Infrastructure: Nebius guided to $40 to $45 billion in 2027 capital spending, up to 85% of it funded by customer prepayments and asset-backed loans; shares closed down 17%.
- Energy: Over half of SoftBank’s $7.1 billion quarterly loss came from power equipment, after nonrefundable deposits on more than 13 gigawatts of gas turbines, nearly 50% beyond what it needed.
- Research: DeepMind opened SatWeave and PARDIG, the satellite imagery and precipitation datasets behind its weather models, claiming PARDIG beats NASA’s IMERG-Final on hourly light-to-moderate rain detection by more than 30%.
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