Suspected Chinese Spy Gained Access to Nvidia’s Jensen Huang

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The world’s most powerful chip executive apparently had an acquaintance nobody warned him about. According to The New York Times, U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that an executive at a Singapore-based Nvidia customer passed information to Beijing. And that woman was in close contact with Nvidia’s chief executive, Jensen Huang. President Trump was reportedly briefed on the matter about a year ago but took no action.

Who Is Alice Huang?

At the center of the case is Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le. She is not related to the Nvidia chief. A Chinese citizen, she was an executive at Megaspeed, a data center operator based in Singapore. According to The Times, she was briefly listed as the company’s managing director after it launched in 2023, before her name disappeared from corporate records. A Chinese investment fund described her as a former television reporter, a claim The Times could not confirm.

U.S. officials originally had Ms. Huang in their sights for a different reason. They were monitoring her as part of an investigation into the smuggling of high-end chips to China. In the process, they came across her contacts with a U.S. citizen who turned out to be Jensen Huang. The two reportedly met several times, including at a party around a tech trade show in Taipei in 2024. According to The Times, the Nvidia chief never received the kind of warning that U.S. citizens usually get in such cases.

Megaspeed and the Missing Chips

Megaspeed runs data centers, buys Nvidia chips for them and rents out the computing power, including to Alibaba and other Chinese companies. According to The Times, a Malaysian sister company bought Nvidia-based equipment worth at least $4.8 billion (about €4.3 billion) in less than two years, an unusually large sum for a small, little-known company. Some of the chips were sourced through Aivres, the U.S. arm of the Chinese group Inspur, which is on a U.S. sanctions list.

The matter came to light in late 2024, when a Commerce Department official visited a Megaspeed data center in Malaysia and found Nvidia equipment still packed in boxes. The Justice Department is now investigating. Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, called for an investigation last year. He described Megaspeed as a spinoff of the Chinese cloud provider 7Road, which he said is owned by the Chinese state, and said its offices in Singapore and Malaysia were nearly empty, with most of its executives based in China.

What It Might Have Been About

What exactly Ms. Huang is suspected of passing to Beijing is not known. But the reports point in two directions.

• Chips for China: Megaspeed is suspected of giving Chinese companies access to Nvidia’s most powerful A.I. chips despite U.S. export restrictions. A good line to the Nvidia chief would have been valuable for that.
• A window into Washington: According to The Times, U.S. officials were mainly concerned about what sensitive information she might have learned about Nvidia or about Mr. Trump’s stance on chip exports. Mr. Huang is considered a close confidant of the president and has repeatedly lobbied for looser export rules.

The latter is what makes the case so sensitive. The Trump administration recently allowed sales of Nvidia’s H200 chips to Chinese buyers under conditions, with the United States taking a 25 percent cut. For Beijing, any detail about Washington’s negotiating position is worth a great deal. How much Nvidia’s China business has suffered in the meantime became clear in March, when the company halted production for the Chinese market.

Nvidia Says the Contacts Were Routine

Nvidia rejects any suspicion. A spokesman, John Rizzo, said Mr. Huang’s contacts with Ms. Huang were neither unusual nor unexpected, since meeting customers is part of a chief executive’s job. Mr. Huang speaks with thousands of customer executives every year, he said, and they do not receive sensitive company information. The allegations that Megaspeed diverted chips to China were thoroughly investigated and debunked last year, he added.

Mr. Huang himself told Bloomberg that the business with Megaspeed was normal. Nvidia had checked all deployments of its graphics processors at Megaspeed and counted every single one, he said. Ms. Huang no longer works for the company. Megaspeed has hired outside lawyers and says it will cooperate with U.S. authorities. The Chinese Embassy in Washington dismissed the reports as baseless smears.

Pressure From Congress

The matter is unlikely to end there. According to The Times, some senior White House officials doubt that Mr. Huang knew nothing of his contact’s activities. Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, is calling for Mr. Huang and Nvidia’s board to testify before Congress. Lawmakers from both parties are working on stricter rules for exporting A.I. technology. The stock market reaction was muted: Nvidia shares lost almost 1 percent on Thursday and fell further in after-hours trading.