Musk Adds His Name to Huang Comeback Drive at NVIDIA

Elon Musk says a petition is being put together to bring Jensen Huang, NVIDIA's former chief and founder, back to the company. Musk also says he will sign it. That makes him the only major tech boss so far to publicly back Huang this way. Musk has supported Huang before. He once backed the idea of Huang returning as chairman.

Musk's companies rely on NVIDIA in a big way. They buy millions of GPUs for huge data centers. Musk has also made NVIDIA the only supplier of AI chips for his firm. He has not brought up open-source AI in this fight. But he has echoed the view that Huang is hard to replace for U.S. AI leadership. Some people in open-source AI circles are also speaking up for Huang. He is the executive who bought Hugging Face for $12.9 billion.

Huang has said he had a close personal tie to a Singapore data-center executive. That executive's company is under review over AI chips allegedly sent to China. Huang's sudden exit from a company worth trillions also drew criticism from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. On a podcast, Clinton said counterintelligence rules call for telling an American citizen about a honeypot operation. CNN reported that U.S. intelligence was still not clear on whether Huang's associate Alice Huang had ties to Chinese intelligence agencies. Attention on Alice Huang as a possible spy came as her company Megaspeed faced scrutiny over chips smuggled to China. She is linked to more than Megaspeed. She also started a company in China. That company later said it could access banned NVIDIA chips at a data center in Shanghai.

The petition push follows a letter that NVIDIA employees allegedly sent to company leaders. It is not clear if workers will join the petition. As Musk's petition takes shape, people are still guessing why Huang left. Open-source fans remember him warmly. Reports also say he worried about selling too many AI computing GPUs.