American spy agencies had gathered striking intelligence. A top executive at a Singapore-based data center company was under scrutiny for possibly steering advanced Nvidia Al chips to China. And now American officials had concluded that she was a Chinese intelligence asset, funneling information to Beijing.
But what came next was even more alarming. Surveillance of the executive, Alice Huang or Huang Le, a Chinese citizen, revealed that she had developed a close relationship with Jensen Huang, Nvidia's chief executive.
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Nvidia said the company that employed Alice Huang, Megaspeed, was like any other regional customer and that it had previously investigated and debunked claims the Singaporean company was smuggling chips to China. John Rizzo, a spokesman for Nvidia, said "Jensen's interactions with companies that have been affiliated with her continued this year to purchase Nvidia chips.
For years, Washington has worked to deny China the technology needed to match or surpass the US in the intense global competition for superiority in artificial intelligence. The discovery that Beijing was getting reports from someone with direct access to Huang, one of the most powerful figures in the Al revolution as well as an influential ally of President Trump's, set off alarms at the White House.
Roughly a year ago, Trump was briefed about the intelligence findings, which have not been previously reported, and chose not to do anything with the information. He has been wary of disrupting Nvidia's chip sales, further complicating the trading relationship with China.
American officials already suspected Huang was helping China evade constraints on its ability to gain access to advanced Al chips. But the revelation that she was feeding information directly to Beijing raised more troubling possibilities, including Huang had insights into Trump's thinking on an issue of vital importance to both nations, one likely to come up when the president visits China next month.
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Jensen Huang was initially briefed on the intelligence last year, US officials did not believe the Nvidia executive knew that Alice Huang was gathering information for the Chinese. Some senior officials inside the Trump administration doubt that Jensen Huang could have remained unaware of what they were pursuing a campaign of "groundless smears and slanders" against China.
The US government has been investigating Megaspeed since late 2024, when a Commerce Department official visited its data center in Malaysia and found the site to be suspicious. Megaspeed is among the firms in Southeast Asia that buy chips to build data centers and then rent their computing power to companies in China. It is essentially a middle man.
For India, which wants Nvidia to set up Al foundry and whose firms buy via Singapore, this shows US export controls now include human intelligence layer.
Tags: #Nvidia #JensenHuang #ChinaSpy #AliceHuang #Megaspeed #AIChips #ExportControl #Trump #Semiconductor #Espionage