A storm bigger than Huang Renxun’s extramarital affair has just arrived
Modern AI
2026.11.11 16:42
· From overseas
Full text 3646 words
Text | Modern AI, author | Tutu, editor | Nie Feng
On November 8, an open letter from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang set off the entire AI circle. In the letter, Huang Renxun publicly admitted his extramarital affair, and then fell into an investigation storm. Nvidia's stock price suffered a series of heavy losses.
But the real crisis is hidden under this sexy news. Just a few days before this letter of apology was released, the midterm elections in the United States had just concluded, in which the Democratic Party won a landslide victory.
After winning the midterm elections, Democratic congressmen posted publicly on X, declaring that they would suspend advanced AI research and development, and even proposed a ban on artificial superintelligence.
The development of AI was forced to press the pause button for a while. In the past few years, AI has been soaring. Wall Street has put AI on the altar, and technology giants have made huge profits from it.
But on the other hand, the burden brought about by this technological revolution is weighing on ordinary Americans.
In the short term, political trends may slow down technological development; but in the long term, the development of this technological revolution is unstoppable.
press pause button
On November 8, Huang Renxun, who has always shown his family image, issued a letter of apology to all NVIDIA employees. He admitted that he had been unfaithful to his wife and said he would take full responsibility.
NVIDIA's board of directors announced the launch of an independent investigation into the incident. Although Nvidia stated that there is currently no reason to believe that company confidentiality has been compromised, the news quickly caused market shock.
On November 9, NVIDIA’s stock price fell again by 4.27%, and its market value evaporated by more than US$190 billion in a single day. Some media said that Nvidia may face the most severe governance turmoil since the company was founded.
Just a few days before this storm occurred, another bigger storm had swept across the entire AI circle.
U.S. stocks plummeted in early November, with the technology sector suffering particularly heavy losses. Nvidia's market value evaporated by US$447 billion in one day, equivalent to approximately 2.9 trillion yuan, which is equivalent to the loss of one Changxin Technology in one day.
Huang Jen-Hsun's personal net worth shrank by US$15.1 billion, and his ranking of billionaires dropped from 9th to 13th. Musk's net worth dropped by $797, and his personal wealth shrank by more than $100 billion in two days.
All this has to do with this year’s midterm elections in the United States.
This year's midterm elections in the United States can be described as witnessing history. The famous traditional red states in the United States have turned blue.
Some netizens joked that the impact of the Texas defection to the Democratic Party was equivalent to that of the only son of the ninth generation in Chaoshan and the only son of Shandong who had just been admitted to the civil service, and their parents even sent their blessings.
In the U.S. midterm elections held on November 3, the Democratic Party achieved a major victory. On the 4th, Arizona Democratic Representative Yasmin Ansari posted:
“The first items on the Democrats’ day-one agenda are to halt the development of advanced artificial intelligence, regulate the out-of-control AI industry, and ban artificial superintelligence.”
Later, Musk used a dystopian novel to satirize Ansari on the social platform X: This is a brave new world.
Ansari’s statement was not a whim. It had already become a pile of bill documents two months ago.
On September 24, Texas Democratic Representative Greg Casar submitted the "Prohibition of Artificial Superintelligence Act of 2026", and Ansari was one of the original co-sponsors.
The bill requires a complete suspension of all advanced AI research and development processes, and no individual or corporate organization is allowed to develop or deploy artificial superintelligence. If violated, the company will be forced to dissolve, and the individual will face up to 20 years in federal prison.
Some netizens said that this sentencing standard is based on the development of nuclear weapons.
Musk mocked the Democratic Party with Brave New World, but he didn’t know that it was not the partisanship in the United States that prevented AI from continuing to surge, but the ordinary people of the United States.
town bill
Tori Martin runs a ranch in San Marcos, Texas, where she grew up and now makes a living raising horses. A high-voltage power line runs across his ranch, and across the road is a power plant.
A developer took an interest in the land behind her house and wanted to build a data center there. Tori told local media that the voltage at home is often unstable and the water supply is cut off at least twice a month, lasting two to three hours.
"The supply of water and electricity is unreliable now. How can we provide it if we build another data center?"
Cases like this are happening across the United States.
Elena, who is 59 years old, lives in Virginia. When she first moved here ten years ago, she could see a quiet oak forest outside the window and the ancient battlefields left by the Civil War. Looking up now, there are only rows of gray-white cement buildings.
This is the world's largest gathering of computing power centers, carrying more than 70% of the world's computing power. In the past two years, as the large-scale model competition has begun, hundreds of ultra-large data centers have been filled.
The cooling fans in the data center run day and night, emitting a low-frequency hum of 60 decibels. Elena had insomnia all night and had to wear noise-canceling headphones to sleep. When the water glass was placed on the table at home, it would keep shaking and causing ripples.
The skyrocketing bills in a small town are more intuitive than the unbearable noise.
In West Des Moines, Iowa, located next to a cornfield, is the super computing cluster built by Microsoft for OpenAI.
In July, in order to cool the hot Nvidia chips, the computer room consumed 11.5 million gallons of local fresh water, which is equivalent to the water consumption of hundreds of American households for a year.
At the same time, residents in Oregon and Arizona received water restrictions from city halls. The government is asking ordinary households to stop watering their lawns and cut back on bath time.
The data center separated by a wall is discharging millions of gallons of cooling water into white smoke into the sky every day.
A West Texas rancher interviewed by the Associated Press is worried that if the drought intensifies and water restrictions are imposed, will data centers be prioritized ahead of ranches?
The old US power grid is also unable to handle the sudden surge in computing power.
Every time ChatGPT answers a question, it consumes ten times more power than a traditional search engine. To protect power, old coal-fired power plants in Utah and Georgia that had been scheduled to shut down this year have relighted their boilers.
In addition to preparing sufficient power supply, the power company also has to repair substations and expand transmission lines to send electricity to the computer room. In April of this year, the Noblesville, Indiana, City Hall held an electric bill hearing.
Resident Monica Cannelly asked in person, in order to deliver power to the data center, can large companies pay for the wires in Dora? The chairman of the state regulator responded that Indiana already has a system in place that requires data centers to bear infrastructure costs.
But residents' bills are still rising. Because even the computer room that is still under planning will enter the power consumption forecast of the power grid in advance. To ensure uninterrupted power supply during peak periods in a few years, the power grid must raise electricity rates now.
Taking the PJM power grid in the eastern United States as an example, the monitoring agency estimates that in the first half of this year, the total wholesale electricity cost was about $11 per megawatt-hour higher by just factoring in data center demand into procurement.
PJM grid electricity prices soared from $28.92 per megawatt day in 2024 to 2025 to $329.17 in 2026 to 2027.
Households in the United States have not yet enjoyed the convenience brought by AI. When they open their bills, they find that their electricity bills have risen from US$150 to more than US$300.
The technological benefits that AI can bring are grand and distant, but the burden of electricity and fresh water is very close to local residents.
About 82% of voters in Asheville, Ohio, rejected the local plan to build two data centers and a supporting gas power station.
There were 41 local votes involving data centers in 10 states that day, of which 40 results tended to restrict development.
In the face of public complaints, OpenAI took the initiative to announce on November 5 that the parks owned and operated by it in the future will bear the cost of electricity and required supporting facilities, and will disclose the park's water, electricity and noise information.
runaway train
Bills are piling up, and employment opportunities for ordinary Americans are shrinking. A large number of American companies have begun to replace human employees with AI.
In February this year, American giant Block held an internal training session. In the middle of the meeting, the manager suddenly asked everyone to check their emails.
In the company's internal chat window, colleagues successively sent out news that they had been laid off. Engineer Debbie, who was in Spain at the moment, turned on his computer and saw the dismissal document that needed to be signed.
He has only been on the job for a few weeks, and his job is to help developers use AI. The team has just made a tool that can generate and publish videos in a few minutes.
Founder Dorsey said: The company's business is still growing. After using AI, fewer employees can do more work. The company announced that 4,000 people would leave, but the stock price rose by more than 20% afterwards.
This phenomenon is happening across the United States.
Eric, from Illinois, is a 34-year-old freelance writer. For the past seven years, he has made a living by writing marketing copy for companies, earning $60 an hour and earning more than 100,000 a year.
Last spring, an old client of four years sent an email saying that the company had decided to use a large model to generate copy and would not renew the contract. Within the next three weeks, the remaining nine customers also terminated their contracts.
Eric tried lowering his hourly wage to $20, but still no one cared. In order to survive, he spent thousands of dollars to enroll in a blue-collar technical class at a local community college and began to learn from scratch how to repair toilets and lay heating pipes.
In Hollywood, designer Reed, who has drawn storyboards for many science fiction blockbusters, did not receive any work in the first half of this year. Today’s AI technology can produce hundreds of pictures in just a few minutes.
This fall, anxiety has spread to blue-collar workers. All 36 ports in the United States were shut down, and 45,000 dock workers went on strike with signs, prohibiting the ports from introducing fully automated equipment and AI gates.
Someone saw the hidden danger behind the calm early on. This spring, Daniel, 31, submitted his resignation letter. When he left, he gave up company options worth $1.7 million and refused to sign a lifetime confidentiality agreement.
He wrote an open letter revealing how technology companies ignore the bottom line of security in order to win business competition. Many researchers have left OpenAI in recent years, accusing the company of not taking security issues seriously enough.
The department responsible for monitoring risks within openAI has been disbanded, and the security testing time before the release of new models is also continuously reduced.
The drawbacks have already emerged. At Westfield High School in New Jersey, several 14-year-old girls had their nude photos generated using AI by boys in their class, which went viral in the school.
After parents called the police, they discovered that there is no current law that criminalizes software developers. In the United States, it takes an average of two years to pass a law, but in Silicon Valley, technology iterations only take two months.
This is the chaos that technology development must pass through.
More than 100 years ago, when cars first hit the streets of the United States, there were no traffic lights, no traffic laws, and frequent traffic accidents. Angry citizens signed a petition to ban cars from the roads.
Eventually, the advent of traffic laws, seat belts, and braking systems allowed cars to successfully hit the road.
This time the Democratic Party presses the pause button on AI development, which can coincide with the transition period of AI from barbarism to civilization. It allows giant AI companies to face up to energy issues, security issues and employment issues.
Humans invented brakes not to ban cars, but to allow them to drive farther away more safely, leading us to that truly brave new world.
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