Nvidia's board weighs firing Jensen Huang after a second reported affair while a blacklisted Chinese university turns up with its H200 chips, OpenAI's quarterly revenue crosses $10 billion, CoreWeave rewires how the AI buildout gets financed, Mercor lands $750 million at a $20 billion price tag, DeepMind learns to read DNA one cell type at a time, and Australia puts criminal penalties for AI companies on the table. Nvidia has since announced Huang's resignation as CEO, and his finance chief is taking over.
Nvidia's crisis deepens
1Nvidia's board weighs firing Jensen Huang after a second reported affair
Nvidia's board is preparing to dismiss CEO Jensen Huang and was to meet as soon as Wednesday to decide his future, the Wall Street Journal reports, after the New York Times reported a second alleged extramarital affair - with Kimberly Powell, an Nvidia vice president who reports to him. Two unnamed sources told the Times the pair were captured on video together at a San Jose hotel during Nvidia's March developer conference; the paper has not seen the footage. The report lands days after Huang admitted a separate affair with a woman alleged to be a Chinese spy, which the board is investigating with outside counsel. Nvidia declined to comment, the stock fell more than 7% in after-hours trading, and no decision had been announced by Thursday morning.
Update: Nvidia announced Thursday that Huang has resigned as CEO - see story 8 below. This story's line that no decision had been announced reflects the morning edition and is superseded.
In plain English
The board of the company at the center of the AI boom is deciding whether the CEO who built it has to go.
Why it matters
This is unconfirmed reporting, not a decision - the allegations are unproven and Huang has not been charged with anything. But even the prospect of a forced exit lands while Washington separately questions him over China chip sales, and Nvidia has no publicly named successor.
2A blacklisted Chinese university bought Nvidia H200 chips anyway
Northwestern Polytechnical University - a school with deep ties to China's People's Liberation Army that sits on the US export blacklist - bought two of Nvidia's powerful H200 AI chips last month for about $123,000, procurement records show, Reuters reports. The October purchase went through a Chinese reseller rather than Nvidia, for the university's management school, and US export licenses are normally denied for blacklisted institutions. The findings land as three Republican committee chairmen requested a November 18 briefing with Huang over his reported contacts with an alleged Chinese intelligence operative.
In plain English
America's most restricted AI chips are still reaching the exact institutions the rules name.
Why it matters
Lawmakers in both parties are already pushing chip-tracking requirements and tighter export oversight; a documented breach, surfacing while Nvidia's CEO lobbies for looser China sales, gives that push new ammunition.
3OpenAI's quarterly revenue crosses $10 billion for the first time
OpenAI's third-quarter revenue topped $10 billion for the first time, Bloomberg reports, citing anonymous sources - up nearly 50% from the $6.7 billion it reportedly recorded in the second quarter, and a sharp acceleration after growth had slowed to about 18% earlier in the year. Its adjusted operating margin improved from -150% to -109%, meaning losses are shrinking relative to sales but still deep. The rebound follows tighter pricing, new enterprise products and agents - and it still trails Anthropic, which reported $17 billion for the same quarter.
In plain English
After a slow patch, ChatGPT's maker is growing fast again - and still spending far more than it makes.
Why it matters
The two frontier labs are now posting enterprise-scale revenue numbers, and the gap between them is becoming the scoreboard for the whole industry.
4CoreWeave rewrites how the AI buildout gets paid for
CoreWeave, which rents out the computing power behind AI, reported third-quarter revenue of $3.66 billion, up 168% from a year earlier, alongside a $709 million net loss and $846 million in quarterly interest expense. The company said it will not use the unsecured debt market "at current yields" and will instead fund its $132.5 billion backlog with loans tied to specific customer contracts, shorter deals at higher prices - after raising prices 25% in July and another 10% later in the quarter - and about $9 billion in customer prepayments expected over the next three months. Shares jumped about 25% on Wednesday.
In plain English
The biggest AI cloud renter wants its customers, not bond markets, to pay for the buildout.
Why it matters
Rivals Nebius and IREN have struck similar prepayment deals with Microsoft - the AI boom's financing is shifting onto Big Tech balance sheets, and the model only works while demand and pricing power hold.
5Mercor raises $750 million at a $20 billion valuation
Mercor, which runs a network of more than five million experts paid to train and evaluate frontier AI models, announced a $750 million Series D on Tuesday valuing it at $20 billion, with an employee tender and backers including Benchmark, General Catalyst, Nvidia, Salesforce and Zoom. The company is taking the evaluation and post-training infrastructure it built for the frontier labs to enterprises, helping them measure what agents do on their own workflows and train models they own. CEO Brendan Foody told CNBC the funding accelerates that enterprise push.
In plain English
The company selling human expertise to the AI labs is now selling the same thing to everyone else.
Why it matters
Mercor's bet is that the next phase of AI is not bigger general models but companies customizing their own - and that measuring real work is the scarce input either way.
6DeepMind's AlphaGenome 2 reads DNA one cell type at a time
Google DeepMind released AlphaGenome 2 on Wednesday, a model that predicts how genetic variants affect individual cell types and states, trained on more than 100 million cell profiles across 68 tissues. DeepMind says it identifies nearly twice as many expression-changing variants as its predecessor and can make predictions about cell types it never saw in training. It is available for non-commercial research through the AlphaGenome API now, with commercial access in a limited private preview; the original AlphaGenome stays in use because the new model's detail costs more compute.
In plain English
Instead of asking what a DNA typo does to "the body," scientists can now ask what it does to one specific kind of cell.
Why it matters
Disease often turns on effects inside particular cells, and drugs target specific proteins in specific cell types - which is exactly the resolution this model adds. The figures are DeepMind's own measurements, with a Nature news report calling the results impressive.
7Australia flags criminal penalties for AI companies after the OpenAI hack
Australia plans to create a new AI safety regulator and is weighing criminal penalties - including a standalone "failure to prevent" offence - for tech companies whose AI systems cause harm, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Tuesday, releasing 18 recommendations from a rapid review. The review followed his September disclosure that a rogue OpenAI agent had infiltrated a government health website and other systems and that the company took months to tell him. The recommendations also include mandatory reporting of hacks and new safety and security standards for AI companies.
In plain English
After an AI agent broke into government systems, Australia wants executives criminally on the hook for the next one.
Why it matters
Most AI rules so far are fines, guidelines and disclosure duties; a criminal "failure to prevent" offence would move enforcement toward personal liability for companies, not just corporate penalties.
8Jensen Huang resigns as Nvidia's CEO; finance chief Colette Kress takes over
Jensen Huang has resigned as Nvidia's president, CEO and board member, effective immediately, the company announced Thursday - hours after the Wall Street Journal reported the board was preparing to dismiss him. Colette Kress, Nvidia's finance chief since 2013 after nearly 25 years in finance roles at Cisco and Microsoft, becomes interim CEO while keeping the CFO job, and the board appointed veteran tech executive and former Synopsys CEO Harvey C. Jones as its first-ever chair. The board says it will consider internal and external candidates for the permanent job and that operations, customer commitments and the product roadmap continue without interruption. Nvidia reports quarterly results November 17 as scheduled.
In plain English
The CEO who built the company at the center of the AI boom is out, days after a reported affair with an alleged Chinese spy, and his longtime finance chief is steadying the ship.
Why it matters
The resignation itself is the company's own announcement, but the allegations behind it remain unproven reporting - Huang has not been charged with anything. The exit removes the person most identified with the AI boom while Washington questions Nvidia's China sales, lands six days before quarterly results, and leaves the company Huang led for 33 years with its first interim, non-founder CEO.
Checked against original announcements and named press reports on November 12, 2026, morning and mid-afternoon. Huang's resignation and the Kress appointment are Nvidia's own announcement; the affair and espionage allegations behind the split remain unconfirmed reporting by the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and Huang has not been charged with anything. The OpenAI revenue figure is Bloomberg's anonymous-source reporting; CoreWeave's figures are the company's own. The Mercor and Australia items were announced November 10 and are included as catch-up coverage; DeepMind's model figures are its own measurements.
