US intelligence: ‘Nvidia CEO Huang was having an affair with a Chinese spy’

The United States believes that the chief executive of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, was in a romantic relationship with a Chinese woman who had been recruited by Beijing to spy on semiconductor giant. This was reported by the Financial Times, citing several sources. The woman, as reported by the New York Times in recent days, was the Chinese senior executive of a data centre company based in Singapore. She had established a very close relationship with the tech giant’s chief executive and had begun spying on him on behalf of Beijing.

The woman was already under scrutiny by US intelligence agencies because she was suspected of helping China circumvent restrictions on access to advanced chips for artificial intelligence. The discovery that she was passing confidential information directly to Beijing immediately set alarm bells ringing at the White House, not least because of Jensen Huang’s close ties to Donald Trump. According to revelations in the New York Times, the woman in question is Alice Huang, an executive at Megaspeed International. Administration officials became aware of the allegations via a briefing from the intelligence services. The matter has taken on a new sense of urgency following the mid-term elections, which will secure the Democrats control of Congress. The Republicans are also closely examining Huang’s links with the alleged spy.

The House Select Committee on China stated in a press release on Thursday that it had sent a letter to Jensen Huang “requesting his participation in a joint closed-door briefing”. “The letter details lawmakers’ concerns regarding Huang’s interactions with Alice Huang, an executive at Megaspeed and, according to media reports, an agent of the Chinese intelligence services, as well as the company’s security protocols against espionage by foreign adversaries,” the committee said in the statement. Megaspeed is part of Nvidia’s cloud partner network. The Singapore-based company purchases equipment from the chip manufacturer and rents out computing power to artificial intelligence developers.

Nvidia stated in a press release, following the publication of the New York Times article, that its partners in the cloud sector ‘do not ask us to push for changes to US legislation or to promote sales in China’. The company added that “anyone attempting to obtain confidential information via our NCP clients would have reached a dead end. We neither hold nor share confidential information with customers’. When asked about the report in the Financial Times regarding a possible romantic relationship, Nvidia referred to Jensen Huang’s previous statements, according to which his relationship with Alice Huang was purely professional.