Report: Suspected Chinese Intelligence Asset Met Repeatedly With Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and Trump Was Briefed a Year Ago
Fox Business, citing The New York Times, says U.S. officials watching chip-export evasion learned a Singapore executive linked to China had met Huang several times. Nvidia calls the meetings routine and Beijing calls the claim a smear.
The world's biggest chipmaker is at the center of a spy story, according to Fox Business, which is relaying a New York Times report.
The report. The Times says U.S. officials concluded that a former executive at Singapore-based cloud company Megaspeed, Alice Huang, also called Huang Le, was suspected of collecting intelligence for the Chinese government. Megaspeed buys Nvidia chips, builds data centers and rents out the computing power. The report notes the firm has faced scrutiny from U.S. agencies.
The discovery. Officials tasked with stopping China from evading export controls on high-end AI chips were watching her when they learned she had met Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang several times, the Times reported. That reportedly alarmed them because of the sensitive information she could glean from the head of the world's largest chipmaker, who has built a relationship with President Trump through talks on AI technology and export controls.
The White House. Per the Times, Trump was briefed about a year ago and took no action, because officials then did not believe Huang knew she was gathering intelligence for China. Fox says it is unclear whether that assessment has changed. Huang was reportedly never warned, and some senior Trump administration officials now doubt he could have been unaware on some level.
The responses. The Chinese government called the allegations "groundless smears and slanders." An Nvidia spokesperson told Fox: "Meetings with customers are part of a CEO's job; Jensen talks with thousands of customer executives every year." The company said it is "confident that if the U.S. government believes that any person is a threat to American industry, it would let us know," and that "Megaspeed has been no different than many other regional cloud customers." The White House did not immediately respond to Fox.
The policy link. Fox notes that in January the administration eased export limits to allow Nvidia's H200 chip to go to China case by case. Trump said the sales would require a 25% fee paid to the U.S. government and would be monitored for national security.
Note for readers: the claims about Alice Huang come from unnamed officials in the Times. No one has said Jensen Huang knew of any intelligence work, and neither Huang has been charged with anything in the report. We have not seen the underlying evidence.