Chips and Secrets #1884

In this episode, Ray Cochrane leads with Nvidia’s board investigating reports that Chinese intelligence targeted CEO Jensen Huang. The same day, Huang told employees he had been unfaithful to his wife. Additionally, he covers the Justice Department’s Super Intelligence Task Force and the fake job interview behind Binance’s $6.3 billion crypto Heist. He also gets to a Sega hack that darkened arcades across Japan and the fall of NASA’s Swift telescope. – Want to start a podcast? It’s easy to get started! Sign up at Blubrry – Thinking of buying a Starlink? Use my link to support the show. Subscribe to the Newsletter. Email Ray if you want to get in touch! Like and Follow Geek News Central’s Facebook Page. Support my Show Sponsor: Best Godaddy Promo Codes Get 1Password Full Summary Ray Cochrane opens with a quiet personal update. He had a relaxing weekend, spending Friday and Saturday night with Grandma and Delaney. They went out to dinner together and just hung out. In his free time, Cochrane is building a new podcasting tool in Rust. So far, the recording API works, along with some diagnostics and debugging tools. After so much time in PHP, he calls it a breath of fresh air. On the audio side, he noticed the mic was still picking up some feedback last episode. He hasn’t rewired the studio yet, and he isn’t sure which device causes the static. Meanwhile, he is adjusting settings and slowly working through the knobs while keeping the voice quality up. Nvidia’s Board Investigates Its CEO The lead story comes from CBS News. On November 8, it reported that Nvidia’s board opened an investigation involving its own CEO. Nvidia designs the chips that much of the AI industry runs on. The board says it is examining news reports that co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang “has been the target of a foreign intelligence effort.” The same day, Huang sent employees a letter, which Nvidia posted on its news site. In it, he admitted he was unfaithful to his wife and apologized. The letter names no one. Its only nod to the spy reports points to the board’s independent investigation, which Huang says he supports. Independent directors, board members who aren’t company executives, will lead that investigation with outside counsel. So nobody who reports to Huang is running it, which Cochrane counts as good news. The board adds that it has “no reason to believe that either national security or NVIDIA secrets were compromised.” Huang stays on as CEO. From what Cochrane has heard, most people like working under him, so he finds the news tragic. How the Story Broke The story broke on October 29 in The New York Times. The paper reported that a businesswoman named Alice Huang had grown close to Jensen Huang. According to the Times, US intelligence officials had concluded she was passing information to Beijing. Despite the shared last name, the two aren’t related. The Times described her as an executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore company that buys Nvidia chips. It also said President Trump was briefed about a year before the story ran and “chose not to do anything with the information.” Later, TechCrunch, citing the Times, reported on a US government memo from earlier in 2026. According to that memo, China’s Ministry of State Security, its main spy agency, recruited her to watch Jensen Huang. On November 6, the Financial Times reported that the same memo describes the relationship as romantic. Then the San Francisco Standard, also citing the Times, reported that Huang named Alice Huang to the board as the other person in the relationship. To Cochrane, Huang seems to be trying to be as transparent as possible. However, no charges have been reported against Alice Huang, and she hasn’t commented. The spy claim rests on unnamed people the Times says were briefed on the surveillance. Meanwhile, China’s foreign ministry called the reports “baseless and purely slanderous smears against China,” which Cochrane calls the response you’d expect. Nvidia, for its part, told ABC News that Huang’s interactions with her were “not unusual or unexpected.” In October, Huang also told Bloomberg News his contact with her was “related to Megaspeed, and it was all completely normal and not unusual.” Megaspeed and the Chip Diversion Worry Megaspeed runs data centers full of Nvidia hardware, and customers pay to use that computing for AI work. According to the Times, its Nvidia chip purchases topped $4.8 billion over about two years. CBS News counts it among Nvidia’s largest customers in Southeast Asia. US officials have looked into Megaspeed since 2024. It started when a Commerce Department official noticed Nvidia equipment at a Malaysian data center that had never been unpacked. Then, in October 2025, Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas called for a Commerce Department investigation of the company. The suspicion is chip diversion. Export controls are the US rules on which technology can leave the country and who may buy it. Under them, Nvidia’s most powerful chips can’t legally be sold into China. In a diversion, chips go to an approved buyer in another country, then move on to a barred one. Cochrane can see why China might try it, since it wants the best chips available. In an unrelated case, federal prosecutors in Los Angeles charged a California man on October 1 with smuggling more than $300 million in export-controlled servers to China. He hasn’t been convicted. Chips can also serve Chinese customers without ever entering China. As Forbes describes Cotton’s concern, Nvidia chips sat in Malaysia and Indonesia while Chinese customers used them from a distance. Investigators also suspect Megaspeed was a route for some chips into China itself. Megaspeed hasn’t been charged with anything, and it says it hired outside counsel for an internal investigation. Nvidia told CNBC that “the diversion allegations against this regional cloud were thoroughly investigated and debunked last year.” Still, the Times reports the US investigation moved to the Justice Department in 2026. The H200 and China In January, the US began allowing one older high-end Nvidia chip, the H200, to be sold to approved Chinese buyers. CNBC reported the US government takes 25 percent of those sales, while newer chips stay barred. Even so, Chinese regulators have kept the H200 out. An Nvidia spokesperson told CNBC that China’s government “blocked U.S. AI chips, protecting its own industry.” Cochrane finds that an interesting approach. Still, he suspects China would study the chips it already has to compare techniques. Huang has argued for selling more to China, and CNBC reported he is close to Trump. According to the Times, he met Trump in April 2025 to argue against the ban. Officials had two worries, the Times reported: what could leak out of Nvidia, and how much access Huang had to the president. When US officials believe a foreign spy service is targeting an American, they can warn that person in a private briefing. Yet the Times reported in October that Huang never got that warning, which Cochrane finds interesting. Congress Wants Answers On November 4, three Republican House committee chairmen asked Huang to a closed-door briefing on November 18. Their committees cover foreign affairs, intelligence, and China. The briefing is a private, voluntary meeting with lawmakers. Over the weekend, Democratic Senator Chris Coons of Delaware said, “Congress will investigate and get answers.” The briefing lands one day after Nvidia reports quarterly earnings on November 17. As of November 8, the company hadn’t said whether Huang would attend. Additionally, the board hasn’t named its committee members, its outside counsel, or a timeline. Cochrane calls it a big story out of Nvidia, and a sad one. People get caught doing the stupidest things, he says, and this is one of them. Sponsor: GoDaddy Economy hosting $6.99/month, WordPress hosting $12.99/month, domains $11.99. Website builder trial available. Use codes at geeknewscentral.com/godaddy to support the show. The Justice Department’s Super Intelligence Task Force The headlines open with a story Cochrane found a little wild. On November 5, the Justice Department announced its new Super Intelligence Task Force. The name traces to a September 29 executive order. It tells federal agencies to write “super intelligence” where they used to write “artificial intelligence,” as far as the law allows. So AI becomes SI, though Cochrane jokes that many might agree it isn’t very super. The order defines SI as the same technology federal law already calls AI. Agencies don’t have to change earlier regulations or contracts. Meanwhile, the president’s science advisor owes him draft language for a new legal definition by November 28, and only Congress can make it law. That same September day, Trump and six tech leaders signed a voluntary pledge called the White House Accord on Super Intelligence. According to CNBC, one of them was Jensen Huang, from the lead story. Attorney General Todd Blanche created the task force in an October 13 memo. Its targets include fraud by people and companies, international crime rings, and foreign governments, along with the groups they back. It coordinates cases from existing offices. It also takes over a unit from January that challenged state AI laws in court, The Next Web reported. There’s no word yet on staffing or cost. Tech Times also noted that prosecutors still need laws that existed before September 29. Meanwhile, PolitiFact, writing on Poynter, checked what the word means inside the AI industry. It wrote, “Superintelligence is AI that exceeds human cognition in nearly all fields, something the industry generally agrees no system has achieved.” Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said: “Changing what we call artificial intelligence does nothing to address the very real risks that come with increasingly powerful AI systems.” Cochrane calls it a loaded change that may not even go through, and he plans to revisit it if it becomes official. Maybe, he muses, they know something the public doesn’t. Google’s $17 Billion Wyoming Data Center Next comes a callback to episode 1883, whose lead story covered voters turning down data centers. On November 5, Google said it will spend $17 billion in Wyoming over the long term, starting with its first data center in the state. Yet WyoFile pointed to a University of Wyoming poll from late October. In it, just 30 percent of residents said more large AI data centers should be allowed. County filings, reported by Cowboy State Daily in July, put the campus in Laramie County, about 8 miles south of Cheyenne. Those filings named Google as the owner of a project the county approved in January under another developer. They show four data centers, with a target completion date of 2031. Google says its first power source will be 702 megawatts of Bloom Energy fuel cells running on natural gas. Fuel cells make electricity through a chemical reaction instead of burning fuel, but they still give off carbon dioxide. Google says most of it will be stored deep underground nearby. Gas generators from Tallgrass and the utility Black Hills Energy will supply more power, and Google’s post doesn’t mention wind or solar. On costs, Google wrote, “We will pay for 100% of the power we use, and when we build data centers, we’ll cover the infrastructure needs directly driven by our growth.” Cochrane thinks that’s the only way communities will start allowing data centers. He points back to last episode’s county, where data centers covered a big share of the budget on a small share of the land. Covering all costs makes the deal enticing, which he finds mildly concerning. Cheyenne Mayor Patrick Collins told WyoFile, “This is not speculative. This is happening.” City Councilman Larry Wolfe told the same outlet, “You know, we’re not easily dazzled anymore.” WyoFile also reported that Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray opposes more AI data centers there. As Cochrane notes, some people still object despite the huge sum on the table. A Fake Job Interview Behind Binance’s $6.3 Billion Heist BleepingComputer reported on November 3 that a phony job interview opened the door to the biggest crypto theft yet. On October 29, attackers moved about $6.3 billion out of the exchange Binance in under four hours. That’s more than four times the old record, Bybit’s $1.5 billion loss in February 2025. The FBI pins both on North Korea, through a hacking team it calls TraderTraitor. Binance’s own report traces the attack to June, when a wallet engineer downloaded a tampered installer for an AI coding tool. Its security staff caught it and swapped out his laptop. Then, in September, a fake project director contacted a second engineer through LinkedIn, according to Fortune. Near the end of his second interview, he was told to download a coding test onto his work laptop. Hidden code ran while he set it up. It was a zero-day malware no one had seen before, so security software had nothing to match it against. On October 20, the attackers used one of Binance’s internal AI tools to take over the June engineer’s computer and a third engineer’s. The June engineer’s machine held a digital pass for launching software on company servers. On October 29, they used it to reach the system that approves moving coins out of Binance’s hot wallets, the ones kept online so withdrawals go out fast. Binance says about $2.85 billion has been frozen or intercepted, and that it, not its customers, will cover the loss. Its report says, “This should not have happened.” North Korea denies any role, and Cochrane isn’t buying it. A Sega Hack Darkens Arcades Across Japan Tom’s Hardware reported on November 8 that arcade games across Japan went dark for about a week after a break-in at Sega. The network belongs to Sega Fave, a Sega group company, which says an outsider got into its servers. On November 1, it shut down ALL.Net, the network linking arcade machines to its servers. The tap-card system players use to load saved progress went down with it. Bandai Namco runs eight arcade games on ALL.Net, including Taiko no Tatsujin and Mario Kart Arcade GP DX, so those went dark too. When ITmedia News visited a Tokyo-area arcade on November 5, the network games were dark while the crane games kept running. Bandai Namco restarted its games for testing on the morning of November 8, Japan time. However, Sega’s own games, including Initial D and maimai, were still down, with Sega’s next update due November 10. Payment details, including credit cards, sit on separate systems that weren’t touched. So far, Sega Fave hasn’t found customer or partner data leaving its servers, and it hasn’t said who did it or how. Cochrane hopes for a follow-up on the culprit and the motive. Seafloor Mud Reveals Hidden Quakes Off Japan Phys.org carried a November 8 report from a University of Tokyo team that includes Professor Yusuke Yokoyama. They went back to a 16-inch tube of seafloor mud pulled up in 2012 off Japan’s Kii Peninsula. Its deepest layer dates to around 1440. Yet the mud looked the same all the way down, whether checked by eye or with X-ray and CT scans. When an underwater slope collapses, it scoops up seafloor mud and drops it all at once, leaving what researchers call an event layer. Yokoyama explained, “Because the redeposited sediments are the same as the materials below, the chemical and structural features were indistinguishable, making the event layers invisible.” So the team measured carbon-14 at spacings under half an inch. Since undisturbed mud gets older with depth, older carbon sitting on younger mud means something stirred it up. Tiny shelled creatures in the same mud gave them calendar years. The Nankai Trough is where one of the plates that make up Earth’s surface dives under southwest Japan. Yokoyama said, “We found several new geological layers that were not visible before, derived from submarine landslides possibly triggered by earthquakes in the Nankai Trough.” Floods and storms are other possible causes. He added that the team could “correlate some of these with written historical records of submarine earthquakes.” Japan’s government puts the odds of a magnitude 8 or 9 quake there within 30 years at 60 to 90 percent or more by one method. By another, it’s 20 to 50 percent. Cochrane can never make sense of that range. Realistically, he says, it means a 20 to 90 percent chance, which hardly works as a metric. AI Tells Individual Birds Apart by Song Science reported on November 6 that an AI system can now pick out individual ovenbirds from recordings of their songs. A team led by Sam Lapp of the University of Pittsburgh published the work in Nature Methods on November 5. On birds it had never trained on, the system named the right bird 96 percent of the time. Right now, tracking which birds survive each year means leg bands. Every bird has to be caught first, which stresses it and takes time. Bands also get lost before anyone checks the next year. The test set came from Alberta, Canada, where microphones had already tied each song to a known bird. Male ovenbirds repeat one song, and no two males sing it exactly alike. The AI learned those differences and grouped the songs so each group could be one bird. After that check, the team followed 405 males across 126 sites over four years. Biologist Scott Sillett of the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, who wasn’t part of the study, told Science, “This is almost a holy grail.” Still, the method only counts males, since they’re the ones singing. Lapp says the hardest part for other species is ground truth, meaning recordings where someone already knows which bird sang each song. Handling birds also gives researchers health information a recording can’t. As Lapp told Science, “The human still needs to be a part of the process.” Cochrane takes that to mean today’s researchers won’t lose their jobs, and he calls the work awesome. NASA’s Swift Telescope Falls to Earth Next comes a sad end to a story the show followed in episodes 1869 and 1871, as NASA attempted to rescue its Swift space telescope. CBS News reported that Swift fell back into the atmosphere at 7:39 a.m. Eastern on November 4, over North Sumatra, Indonesia. It had been in orbit for nearly 22 years. Swift launched in 2004 on a mission meant to last two years. It hunted gamma-ray bursts, brief flashes of the most energetic light, which can come from collapsing giant stars and colliding neutron stars. Other observatories counted on its alerts, since it could swing its telescopes onto a burst quickly. By NASA’s count, it observed more than 2,000 bursts and 1,400 exploding stars, which Cochrane calls a great investment. Years of heavy solar activity heated and puffed up Earth’s upper atmosphere, and the extra drag pulled Swift lower. So NASA paid Katalyst Space $30 million to send a robotic spacecraft to grab it and boost it higher. On August 19, they called off the capture because they couldn’t reliably control the rescue craft. It never came closer than about 7 miles. In August, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said, “This is not the outcome we were working toward, but it does not change why this mission was worth attempting.” NASA put the chance of falling pieces hurting anyone at about 1 in 2,100. Most of Swift burned up, and space writer Leonard David wrote that it wasn’t yet known whether any pieces hit land or water. Cochrane hopes nobody was hurt. A Gas Over a Martian Volcano Hints at Magma Smithsonian Magazine reported on November 6 about a gas over a Martian volcano that may come from underground magma. The gas is hydrogen chloride, which volcanoes on Earth can give off as rising magma loses pressure. An international team published the finding in Science Advances on November 4. It used readings from the European Space Agency’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter. Hydrogen chloride normally shows up all over Mars in its warm season. However, these readings came in the cold northern summer, in short spikes, and only over Alba Mons. That volcano covers about as much ground as the lower 48 states. The orbiter’s camera also spotted fresh-looking cracks on its northern side, each about 330 feet long. The team thinks magma deep down gives off gas that seeps up through cracks like these. Ice seals the cracks in winter, and summer lets the gas out. While the paper calls ongoing magma activity the best explanation, co-author Kevin Olsen of Oxford told National Geographic that “the nature of the source is unknown.” Hydrothermal systems are networks of hot water moving through underground rock. The study’s lead author told Reuters, “Such active hydrothermal systems may provide the energy sources and favorable conditions needed to support microbial life.” National Geographic reported that nobody expects an eruption soon. For Cochrane, active magma could open up many new hypotheses, and possible microbial life on Mars would be a huge research topic. Cochrane wraps up with housekeeping. Listeners can become a GNC Insider at geeknewscentral.com/insider, email [email protected] to reach Ray or Chris, or leave a comment on the episode. He also points to podcastapps.com for a modern podcast app, and he uses Pocket Casts himself. Finally, he thanks GoDaddy for more than twenty years of keeping the show on the air. He also admits the newsletter at geeknewscentral.com hasn’t been going out. He wasn’t sure how his dad handled it, but now that the show runs more consistently, he plans to restart it. Rather than a wall of article text, he’s thinking of showing links and a short personal update. Listeners with a preferred format are welcome to send it in. The post Chips and Secrets #1884 appeared first on Geek News Central.