Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s CEO and one of AI’s most important people, was reportedly targeted by a data centre executive working as a spy for the Chinese government, a new report suggests.
According to the New York Times, citing undisclosed sources that were briefed on the matter, Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le, was being watched by US agencies due to suspicion of involvement in data centre chip smuggling from Singapore. During that surveillance, the officials are said to have determined that Alice Huang was acting as an intelligence asset.
Moreover, those officials are also said to have determined that Alice Huang had a close relationship with Jensen Huang (no relation). The NYT suggests that officials were concerned that Alice Huang may have been able to extract information from this relationship that would be useful to the Chinese state—what with Nvidia being pivotal to America’s AI efforts.
It’s said that Jensen Huang had, at the time, not been briefed on the threat of foreign intelligence services. It was later implied Nvidia was not briefed on Alice Huang, either. The Nvidia CEO has a close relationship with US president Donald Trump, and has travelled with the US president to China and was more recently called by the president while on stage at an AI event.
The US has approved the sale of some AI chips to China, though they are not the cutting-edge Blackwell chips that US firms have access to—providing they pay a pretty penny, anyways. China had been blocking some of these chips on its side, but recent reports suggest older Nvidia H200 cards are reaching China in small amounts.
As it stands, the White House, CIA, and NSA have all declined to comment to the NYT. Who knew what, and when, is still up in the air. Even Alice Huang’s status with the data centre company that was under scrutiny for chip smuggling, Megaspeed, is not currently clear.
Nvidia has also pushed back on a few of the claims made in the NYT report. The company says that claims Megaspeed had any involvement in chip smuggling were debunked last year in a statement to CNBC.
“The diversion allegations against this regional cloud were thoroughly investigated and debunked last year,” says spokesperson John Rizzo.
Rizzo also pushed back on Huang’s relationship with Alice Huang being anything exceptional to the NYT.
“Jensen’s interactions with Ms. Huang are not unusual or unexpected. Meetings with customers are part of a CEO’s job; Jensen talks with thousands of customer executives every year.”
He also added that Nvidia believes the US government would have made it known had there been any threat to American industry, and that Megaspeed would have received “ordinary business information” and not trade secrets; “zero information relevant to national security.”