From Bollywood to Clippy: Nvidia scandal, Outlook glitch fuel meme storm

By Akash Sriram and Arpan Varghese

Nov 13 (Reuters) - Jensen Huang as a Bollywood matinee idol, as a character from "The Matrix" or donning a red velvet suit on a poster for an alternate-universe version of "The Spy Who Shagged Me": the Nvidia co-founder's extramarital affairs, including with a Chinese businesswoman, set the Internet afire this week.

The storm of AI generated video and images, many of the clips were likely made with the help of Nvidia graphics chips, provided some light relief to a scandal that toppled one of the tech industry's most prominent CEOs, wiping out hundreds of billions of investor value and triggering investigations worldwide.

The Huang memes competed for the spotlight with a raft of comedic takes on the more than 12-hour outage of Microsoft MSFT.O services including Outlook and Teams, topping off a week that kicked off with the latest Stephen Miller vampire memes after U.S. President Donald Trump named him as chief of staff, effective Monday.

But it was humor on the crisis surrounding Jensen Huang's exit from Nvidia NVDA.O that dominated many social media feeds, with many of the clips likely made using Nvidia graphics chips, RaviKunvariyaX quipped on X.

"Jensen is literally funding the infrastructure, selling the hardware, and collecting revenue while the internet uses his own technology to troll him," the user said.

One widely shared image showed Jensen Huang in an Nvidia shirt turning away from logos for AI models including OpenAI, Google's Gemini and DeepSeek, then pointing at a woman labeled "Chinese Model," a play on the allegations surrounding his resignation.

A satire on X placed Jensen Huang and Alice Huang's faces over those of actors in the opening credits of the classic sit-com "Three's Company," about a man with two female roommates.

Others included an AI-generated video with millions of views featuring US President Donald Trump, along others depicting what ostensibly happened behind the scenes at the chip giant. Nvidia was among the trending topics in popular platforms such as Reddit and X for most of this week.

A more than 12-hour outage of Microsoft MSFT.O services, including Outlook and Teams, that sent some business scrambling for fax machines, phones and paper added fresh fodder for the meme factories late in the week.

'HAPPY FRIDAY'

"No rush. Take your time ... Happy Friday," read one widely shared post, signed "Every corporate employee," X user omgsidewalks posted. The X post was viewed over 4 million times.

Other memes imagined a role for Microsoft's much maligned 'Clippy' 90s-era virtual helper either causing or explaining the outage.

Microsoft's services have been a repeat meme subject, including after a global IT outage in 2024 triggered by a faulty CrowdStrike update, that crashed Windows machines.

"every year, microsoft should turn off outlook for an afternoon so we can all go outside and play with out friends :)," read another X post with thousands of views.