Nvidia founder and CEO, Jensen Huang, speaks during the company's keynote at the 2025 Consumer Electronics Show at the Mandalay Bay hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, on 6 January 2025. Nvidia founder and CEO, Jensen Huang, speaks during the company's keynote at the 2025 Consumer Electronics Show at the Mandalay Bay hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, on 6 January 2025. A scandal tests Nvidia's dominance as tech billionaires seek to mend ties with Democrats after the midterm elections This was originally published in TechScape, a newsletter about how technology shapes our lives. Today in tech, we're talking about Nvidia's salacious scandal, tech tycoons trying to reconcile with Democrats, and what billionaires should spend their money on if not elections. On the opening night of Web Summit in Lisbon, the Nvidia CEO, Jensen Huang's admission that he had an affair with a Chinese datacenter executive suspected to be a spy for Beijing hit the main stage.

Say More Look Up Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Mashable Selects Trending Now Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Safety Net Mashable @Home In My Bag Versus Creator Playbook Getting Technical with Mashable All Series Politicians are walking a tightrope when it comes to regulating AI. Politicians like Michigan Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed have some big decisions to make on AI. As Congress returns to Washington this week, the massive power demands of the AI boom have forced a reckoning over data center infrastructure. The Senate is preparing for a pivotal procedural vote on legislation that would speed approvals for energy projects while requiring large data centers to shoulder more of the costs they impose on the power grid. The bipartisan bill would add much-needed regulations on data centers, but, as some politicians believe, may also encourage data center construction.

Leading the Future, backed by Silicon Valley's biggest billionaires, had a war chest of $100 million and an aggressive stance against AI regulation. All of it didn't add up to much on Tuesday night. Leading the Future, the biggest pro-AI super PAC network, is walking away from the midterm elections with just over $20 million still in the bank and a roster of dozens of successful congressional candidates from both sides of the aisle. At first glance, that looks like a win. The details tell another story, though.

Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Safety Net Say More Look Up Mashable @Home In My Bag Versus Trending Now Creator Playbook Mashable Selects Getting Technical with Mashable All Series The tech industry worked to elect candidates allergic to regulation, even as Silicon Valley said it wants federal guidelines on AI. The AI industry has spent this midterm cycle pouring record sums into super PACs. Tech executives contributed hundreds of millions to elect friendly, deregulation-minded candidates, even as some of those execs publicly call for federal industry standards on AI . With the public souring on data centers, the massive donations felt like an exercise in terrible timing for the candidates who took the money -- and extra clumsy on the donors' part, since Silicon Valley picked a side that most polls say is doomed to fail. And, if the polls are right, a newly empowered Congress could hand the industry the kind of oversight it never intended.

How Many Billions Would It Take to Hold Meta Accountable? Meta got hit this week with its biggest fine yet, the latest in a mounting pile of court-ordered payments. Earlier this week, a New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay a $25 billion fine for violating consumer protection laws dating back to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. A quick recap of the case: Filed in 2021, the suit alleged that the company violated the state's Unfair Practices Act by lying to Meta users about the way it handled their data. In September, a jury ruled in favor of the state.

'The tech bro fight club is real!' The titans of AI get the Succession treatment in a wild new TV show The Audacity is a fearless satire taking on Silicon Valley's'egomaniac weirdos'. S howrunner Jonathan Glatzer wanted the tagline of his latest TV creation to be: "We're so fucked." "Sadly it got rejected by the network. Hey, maybe I can use it for season two!" The show in question is The Audacity, his darkly comic drama about AI tech titans. Instead, it went with the more PG tagline "Move fast and break people" - a twist on "Move fast and break things", the Facebook motto coined by Mark Zuckerberg. The Audacity promises to do for tech bros what Succession did for legacy media. Considering Glatzer is a former writer on Succession, that is no empty threat.

Meta's board feared that its CEO's departure could disrupt the company's AI ambitions. A new stock agreement gives him financial incentives to stay put. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has agreed to keep living in Silicon Valley for eight years, potentially exposing himself to billions of dollars in one-time taxes if California voters approve a contentious ballot measure next month, according to a company regulatory filing released Wednesday. During a dinner with Meta board members on September 9, Zuckerberg informed them that he was considering leaving California because of the measure, known as Proposition 40, and that he planned to list his Palo Alto, California home for sale four days later, the 109-page filing stated. The ballot proposal, which could be subject to lawsuits even if voters approve it, calls for a one-time 5 percent tax on stock and other assets held by billionaires in the state as of January 2026.

It's the latest in a growing wave of bets that AI companies are making on brain data. OpenAI's venture capital arm as well as Peter Thiel's Founders Fund are investing in Coherence Neuro, a startup developing a brain implant to detect and treat cancer . The investments are part of a $45 million seed funding round for Coherence and reflect Big Tech's burgeoning interest in brain data . Coherence's CEO and cofounder Ben Woodington says there is "growing synergy" between the big AI labs and companies building devices to decode the brain, known as brain-computer interfaces . "The idea of capturing data to train better models and use it to optimize treatments is going to be super important," he says.

An ex-OpenAI engineer accused of planting a recording device in an executive conference room at the AI company appears to have received considerable support from the Saudi government, United States prosecutors have said in a court filing. Federal prosecutors allege that the defendant, Abdulrahman Alfozan, 35, was in frequent communication with an unnamed member of the Saudi royal family and that a Saudi military official paid for a one-way plane ticket for Alfozan's wife and young son to return to Saudi Arabia after his arrest, according to the court document, made public late on Sunday. Alfozan, a Saudi national and lawful permanent resident in the US, is scheduled to appear in federal court in San Francisco later on Monday. The case has highlighted security challenges around sensitive AI research as companies and governments compete fiercely for an edge in the transformational technology. "The defendant went to significant lengths to create customized, encrypted recording devices to secretly record highly sensitive meetings involving senior OpenAI personnel and executives, high-level business counterparts, and government officials, all while communicating with individuals of significance in Saudi Arabia and pursuing opportunities in -- and making plans to travel to -- Saudi Arabia," prosecutors wrote in a detention memo.

WIRED was the first magazine to cover Theranos and its enticing billionaire founder. There were warning signs even then. Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced founder of the fraud-ridden blood-test company Theranos, made her national press debut in The Wall Street Journal in 2013. It ran in the Opinion section, by a writer on the Journal's editorial board named Joseph Rago, winner of a Pulitzer Prize for critiques of the Affordable Care Act. He wrote that he was impressed by the prospect of individuals having more direct control of their health care; no less an eminence than former secretary of state George Shultz, a Theranos board member, had told Rago that Holmes was the next Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. By 2014, Holmes was the youngest woman billionaire ever, and the mid-2010s were electric with tech-industry success stories--the iPhone, Tesla, Airbnb, Twitter.