There is a particular poetry to this one. Jensen Huang, chief executive of Nvidia and the single most important person in the AI hardware business, spent the last week being turned into memes by the thousand after acknowledging an affair to staff on 8 November. And every one of those memes, the deepfake kiss-cam edits, the Usher “Confessions” mashups, the AI dance clips, was generated on the exact silicon his company sells.
The numbers, roughly
The detection firm Copyleaks counted at least 70 AI-generated posts about Huang on X, pulling in around 8.42 million views by Monday morning. That is the tracked tip of a much larger pile, but it is enough for a back-of-envelope too good not to do. Treat these figures as illustrative rather than gospel, because nobody publishes the real ones.
A single AI-generated clip from an open video model costs somewhere around 90 watt-hours of electricity, per a 2025 study. Seventy clips, then, is about 6 kilowatt-hours: roughly one cycle of a tumble dryer. Even if the true volume runs to a thousand variants once you count every repost and remix, you are at perhaps 90 kilowatt-hours, about a week of an average home’s electricity. On one of Nvidia’s own H100 chips, which draws around 700 watts, that is a rounding error, a handful of chip-hours. The meme wave that humiliated the Nvidia boss consumed a sliver of a single one of his own products.
Why it is funnier than it is cruel
Huang is a billionaire running the most valuable picks-and-shovels operation in history, so he is fair game to laugh at. The joke is not the affair, which is his family’s business. The joke is the machine. Nvidia’s entire pitch is that its chips power the future of creativity and intelligence. This week the future of creativity was a nation of anonymous accounts rendering the CEO into a kiss-cam, at a cost of roughly one load of laundry, on his own hardware.
What this means
The same tool that mints infinite content at near-zero cost does not check whose face it is using or whether the subject is enjoying it, and the most powerful man in the industry found that out in public. The compute to humiliate anyone is now trivial, cheap and pointed at everyone. Jensen Huang simply got to experience his own product from the wrong end first.
Figures are rough, illustrative estimates; exact energy use varies widely. Sources: Korea JoongAng Daily; Copyleaks via coverage; open-model energy study, 2025.