Jensen Huang Spy Report: Nvidia CEO Tied to Alleged China Asset
US intelligence agencies concluded that Alice Huang, a Chinese executive at Singapore data center firm Megaspeed, was passing information to Beijing while building a close relationship with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, The New York Times reported on October 29. The Jensen Huang spy report says President Donald Trump was briefed about a year ago and chose not to act. Nvidia denies that any sensitive information was shared.
What the Jensen Huang Spy Report Says
According to the Times, which cited people briefed on classified surveillance, US officials first suspected Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le, of helping steer advanced Nvidia AI chips to China in breach of US export controls. They later concluded she was a Chinese intelligence asset feeding commercial information to Beijing. She is not related to the Nvidia chief.
The report says surveillance of her continues, that Jensen Huang never received a defensive briefing, the warning US officials sometimes give to Americans targeted by foreign spies, and that companies linked to her kept buying Nvidia chips this year. Officials reportedly worried she could gain insight into Trump’s thinking on chip exports ahead of his planned visit to China next month. The White House, the CIA and the NSA declined to comment, according to the paper.
Nvidia Pushes Back
Nvidia spokesperson John Rizzo told the Times that Jensen Huang’s meetings with Ms. Huang were “not unusual or unexpected,” adding that the CEO talks with thousands of customer executives every year. In a statement to CNBC, the company called Megaspeed a regional cloud customer that receives ordinary business information, “not sensitive Nvidia trade secrets,” and said earlier chip diversion allegations against it “were thoroughly investigated and debunked last year.”
Singapore Disputes Part of the Coverage
On October 30, Singapore’s Ministry of Home Affairs issued a clarification to a Wall Street Journal follow-up, saying Alice Huang “was not investigated in Singapore” over alleged links to Chinese intelligence. Singapore police said a separate investigation into Megaspeed is ongoing, and noted that four people and four companies were charged between February 2025 and July 2026 for fraud on server suppliers.
Why It Matters
Nvidia sits at the center of the US and China contest over AI hardware. Washington cleared the H200 for sale to China earlier this year, but Beijing blocked the imports, and Nvidia previously wrote off about $4.5 billion in China-specific chips. The allegations land as demand for AI hardware keeps squeezing supply chains, a trend behind soaring RAM prices and record results at memory makers such as China’s CXMT. It is also the second recent case of alleged espionage touching a major AI company, after a former OpenAI engineer was arrested over alleged spying for Saudi Arabia.
No charges have been filed against Alice Huang, and the intelligence findings described by the Times have not been made public.
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