Friday, 13 November 2026 · Daily Briefing

Pulse AI Briefing

The board met on Wednesday night and had his resignation by Thursday morning. Nvidia now has a finance chief as interim chief executive, a chair for the first time in its history, a Democratic inquiry into its China sales and a results call in four days.

The signal

Nvidia removed its founder in a morning and has not yet named the person who replaces him

The board accepted Jensen Huang’s resignation as president, chief executive and a director, effective immediately, the company said on Thursday morning after meeting the night before. Colette Kress, chief financial officer since 2013 and previously a finance executive at Cisco and Microsoft, becomes interim chief executive while keeping the finance job. The board also appointed Harvey C. Jones, the former chief executive and executive chairman of Synopsys, as its first-ever chair — a post the company had done without for 33 years. A search for a permanent chief executive is under way, open to internal and external candidates.

The reported shortlist is a measure of the difficulty. Bloomberg and The Verge have put Kress alongside Apple’s hardware chief Johny Srouji, Nvidia vice-president Ian Buck, Arm chief executive Rene Haas and AMD’s Lisa Su, who is Huang’s cousin and runs the company that has been his most credible competitor in accelerators. Nvidia has a single class of stock, so there is no founder block for the directors to work around and no family vehicle to satisfy. The constraint is that the job is only partly operational: it is the allocation of scarce manufacturing capacity, and the management of a relationship in Washington that turned adversarial this week. Kress has spent her career in finance and has the confidence of the board; putting a former Synopsys chief executive in the chair for the first time gives the board an engineering voice it did not previously have in the room.

The political clocks are running in parallel. On Thursday, Representative Richard Neal of Massachusetts and Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the senior Democrats on the two tax-writing committees, asked the Commerce Department to preserve records on the arrangement that let Nvidia’s H200 chips reach China: chips fabricated in Taiwan, shipped first to the United States, charged a tariff on the way through, then licensed for export, which their letter calls “what appears to be an unconstitutional export tax system”. They want to know why Commerce kept approving Megaspeed, the Singapore-based customer at the centre of the case, after intelligence officials raised concerns. As the minority they can ask questions but cannot compel answers. Huang, separately, has agreed to appear behind closed doors before three Republican-led committees by Thanksgiving, after Brian Mast, John Moolenaar and Rick Crawford threatened a subpoena. Mast said he expects the session to be recorded on video and transcribed.

The market’s verdict was mild by the standards of the week: the shares closed 4.3 per cent lower. “NVIDIA’s strength has always come from its people, and together with our leadership team, I am committed to building on the extraordinary foundation Jensen created over the last 33 years,” Kress said in the announcement. Jones framed the handover as continuity rather than repair: “Colette has helped lead NVIDIA through a period of extraordinary growth and has a deep understanding of our business, customers, operations and financial position.” The three documents worth reading together are Nvidia’s transition announcement, The Verge on the mechanics of the handover and TechCrunch on what the open-weights camp loses with him.

This morning

Today’s Briefing

Platform · 12 November

Nvidia’s $12.9 billion Hugging Face deal is agreed but not closed, and nobody will say which way it goes

Huang was the most senior advocate for open weights inside the largest AI company by market value, and he made the case in commercial terms as well as philosophical ones: open models let Nvidia sell chips to states, enterprises and anyone who wants to own their own weights, which diversifies a customer base that frontier labs are steadily trying to design out by building their own silicon. What is now in question is whether his successor inherits the argument. Nvidia agreed in September to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, the second-largest acquisition in its history behind Groq’s assets at $20 billion, and the deal has yet to be finalised. It has also agreed to pay $6 billion for a non-exclusive licence to Poolside’s technology, and Huang personally pushed the Nemotron family of open-weight models built for long-running agentic work. One company insider told TechCrunch they do not expect the leadership change to affect Nemotron development. Nathan Lambert, who tracks the open-model field closely, was blunter: “Jensen no longer being CEO would be very very bad for the open model cause in the US.”

Source: TechCrunchDelangue: “we’ll keep fighting”

Policy · 12 November

The Democratic inquiry is aimed at Commerce, not at Huang, and that is the point

Neal and Wyden wrote to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick asking the department to preserve records on how the H200 arrangement was built and licensed, and their account of it is specific: the president agreed to permit the sales on condition the Taiwan-made chips were routed through the United States first, a tariff took a share as they passed, and the department then issued the export licence. They note that a 15 per cent revenue share on China sales had already been agreed with Nvidia and AMD in August 2025, and they ask why Megaspeed was allowed to keep buying chips after US intelligence flagged concerns about its executive Alice Huang and her relationship with Nvidia’s chief executive. The inquiry is therefore about the administration’s licensing conduct, not only about the company’s. It is a request, not a subpoena: the signatories are the ranking members of the minority on Ways and Means and Senate Finance, and the committees they sit on cannot compel a cabinet secretary to answer them.

Source: TechCrunchHuang agrees to testify

Models · 12 November

Gemini 4 Hydrogen is now the default in AI Mode, and it answers with tables, maps and working simulations

Google put the model into Search globally on Thursday, and the pitch is comprehension rather than benchmark position: it parses questions with several parts, hard-to-read typos and highly specific constraints, addresses each part, and runs simultaneous queries across the relevant subtopics so that a single answer carries a wider set of links than before. The output is more visual — comparison tables, graphs, maps and, in one demonstration, an interactive animated simulation explaining how a phone works out which lane of a highway a car is in without a signal. Thinking levels now run low, medium, high and a new “xhigh”. It ships in Search, the Gemini app, all tiers of AI Studio, the Gemini API, Gemini for business and Antigravity for Pro and Ultra subscribers. Robby Stein, who runs product for Search, said it is “now the new default model in AI Mode & being used for your hardest questions in AI Overviews”. Google claims it matches or beats Claude Sonnet 5.5 and GPT-6.1 Terra in its class, which is a claim about parity at the middle of the market, not at the top.

Source: GoogleThe Verge on the launch

Infrastructure · 12 November

Nebius wants to spend $40 billion next year and is already missing the deliveries that pay for it

The neocloud used its third-quarter call to lay out $40 billion of planned 2027 spending, far more than Wall Street expected, to be funded by customer prepayments and loans secured against customer contracts — building the data centres out of their own future revenue. The model depends on delivery dates, and one of them has slipped. Microsoft, one of its largest customers, has a contract worth up to $19.4 billion for capacity at a Vineland, New Jersey site that is now months behind schedule; only just over half of that capacity is due by the end of this year, with the rest moved to the second quarter of 2027. The delay came from the site operator winding down temporary generation faster than planned while switching to Bloom Energy fuel cells, a transition that was not entirely voluntary: the investigative outlet Floodlight found at least 45 unpermitted gas generators running at the site, and New Jersey regulators fined the operator $1.1 million. “Building at this scale is hard, and delays are part of our industry right now,” said chief executive Arkady Volozh. “We are not immune.”

Source: TechCrunch

Economy · 12 November

SoftBank booked nearly half again as many gas turbines as it needed and wrote off $3 billion

The group reported a $7.1 billion quarterly loss on Tuesday, more than half of it from power-generating equipment. Beginning about two years ago, its SB Energy subsidiary placed non-refundable deposits on more than 13 gigawatts of turbines, close to 50 per cent more than it needed, on the theory that whoever controlled the queue would control the price of power for AI. The queue now runs into the early 2030s and the bet has been marked down instead. “This charge is just that price discovery finally happening,” said Peter Gardett of Noreva, who argued SoftBank had no choice but to overbook if it wanted turbines immediately. The more useful signal is what operators are concluding: Brent Nelson of Ascend Analytics told TechCrunch that a smaller grid connection plus large batteries is the better answer for most data centres than islanded gas, because gas carries winter curtailment risk that the grid does not. SoftBank may have found the ceiling for gas as an AI power strategy. It has not found the ceiling for AI’s power demand.

Source: TechCrunch

Product · 12 November

Meta’s Muse will now telephone the cable company on your behalf, if you subscribe

After testing the capability in September, Meta has turned on outbound calls to US businesses for paid subscribers of its consumer agent, which passed 10 million users last month. Alexandr Wang, Meta’s chief AI officer and head of Superintelligence Labs, described the target as the calls people put off rather than the ones they enjoy: the cable company, the DMV, a restaurant that does not take online bookings. The interesting part is the direction of travel rather than the feature. This week United Airlines barred third-party AI agents from its booking systems, citing cybersecurity risk; a voice agent that dials a business is a different fight, over disclosure and consent rather than terms of service, and it arrives with no industry agreement about who is liable when an agent misrepresents the person it is calling for.

Source: TechCrunch

Research · 12 November

Forty-eight agents found a Maya site that a journal had published last year

Pietro Miotti, a Google researcher working on what he describes as a personal side project with no Google compute or resources, set 48 AI agents to comb NASA lidar data for unrecorded archaeological sites. The agents flagged numerous shapes, including one major village that did not appear in existing registers. He asked Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History whether it knew of a registered site there, using the agents to translate the correspondence, and was told it did not. “It took less than 72 hours to go from a random thought while traveling to an official reply from the Mexican government,” he wrote. “This is by far the best time ever to be alive.” Archaeologists then pointed out that the site had been described in an academic journal last year, and that local communities generally know what is in their own landscape. The failure is not the model’s: lidar pattern-matching is a reasonable thing for an agent to do. It is that a plausible shape, a government’s silence and three days of enthusiasm were treated as evidence, when the step that was missing is the one a specialist would have taken first.

Source: The VergeMiotti’s own writeup

Calendar

What to Watch

  • 17 November

    Nvidia’s third quarter, presented by its finance chief

    Results at about 1.20pm Pacific, call at 2pm, “as previously scheduled”, with Kress’s written commentary posted to investor.nvidia.com immediately afterwards. It will be the first results call in the company’s history not led by Huang. Watch two things: whether Kress takes the analyst questions herself or hands them round the leadership team, and whether anyone on the call puts a timetable on the permanent appointment. A search described as open to external candidates, running through a quarter in which the company is allocating the scarcest manufacturing capacity in the industry, is a governance discount with a number attached.

  • 18 November

    Anthropic sets its IPO price

    Expected pricing for 825 million Class A shares at $70 to $78, subject to the SEC declaring the registration statement effective, with the roadshow having opened on 10 November. Watch where the price lands inside that band rather than whether the deal gets done: the top of the range supports the fully diluted valuation the private market has been carrying since the summer, and a print near $70 does the arithmetic for every AI company still waiting for a window.

  • 18 to 19 November

    APEC in Shenzhen

    The 33rd Economic Leaders’ Meeting, with the president saying he will travel and expects to meet Xi Jinping, and Vladimir Putin’s attendance turning a bilateral into a three-way. The agenda was meant to be trade facilitation and AI cooperation. It now sits eight days after a Chinese espionage allegation brought down the chief executive of the company at the centre of the chip trade, which is either the best possible cover for a deal on export controls or the worst.

  • 19 November

    ANT’s first day of trading

    Nasdaq listing under the ticker ANT, the day after pricing. Watch the first hour against the offer price rather than the size of the raise. A pop is a fundraising event; a flat or broken open is a repricing of the whole private AI complex, and it lands the same week that Nvidia — the comparable every one of those valuations leans on — is being run by an interim chief executive.

  • By 26 November

    Huang’s closed-door testimony

    The former chief executive has agreed to appear before the foreign affairs, China and intelligence committees by Thanksgiving, behind closed doors, with Mast saying he expects video and a transcript. Watch for the transcript rather than the statements afterwards: it is the only forum so far in which Huang will be asked, under oath or its equivalent, what he knew about Alice Huang, when he knew it, and whether his advocacy for looser export controls was connected to the relationship.