Chinese Businesswoman Drinking With Jensen Huang Suspected of Gathering Intelligence for Beijing

A Chinese government spy has reportedly approached Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to gather intelligence, with President Donald Trump taking no special action even after receiving briefings on the matter.

U.S. intelligence agencies believe that a Chinese national named Alice Huang maintained close ties with CEO Huang and leaked information to China, The New York Times (NYT) reported on the 29th, citing multiple sources briefed on the matter.

Alice Huang is a senior executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore-headquartered data center company.

Some Chinese materials indicate that she previously worked as a broadcast journalist in China. She later worked for major Chinese banks before moving to Husi Capital, an investment firm financing semiconductor and AI companies.

While Alice Huang introduced herself externally as the CEO of Megaspeed, company records show she actually served as a managing director during its early stages and later stepped down from the board.

Megaspeed purchases Nvidia chips to build data centers and leases the resulting computing resources to Chinese firms. Nvidia lists the company as a cloud partner on its website.

An affiliate of the company in Malaysia purchased at least 4.8 billion dollars worth of artificial intelligence equipment containing Nvidia chips between June 2024 and February of this year, an unusually massive amount for a small company.

U.S. authorities have been investigating Megaspeed since 2024 over suspicions that the firm may have been smuggling some restricted Nvidia chips into China.

This came to light during a Department of Commerce on-site inspection, which revealed that some of the equipment purchased by the company was stored in its original packaging without being installed in data centers.

Subsequently, while conducting electronic surveillance on Alice Huang, U.S. authorities confirmed she was in contact with a U.S. citizen.

Through an immediate "identity unmasking" process to determine the target's identity, it was revealed that the U.S. citizen was Jensen Huang.

LinkedIn photos confirmed that in June 2024, Alice Huang sat next to Jensen Huang and drank with him at a bar in Taipei, Taiwan, in the presence of other AI company executives.

She was also spotted leaving a restaurant after a business dinner with Jensen Huang and other AI supplier representatives in May of last year.

Reports indicate she also raised investment funds by flaunting her close ties on social media, posting photos taken with Jensen Huang.

The White House has been put on high alert.

This is because Alice Huang may have gathered information regarding Nvidia's technologies as well as President Trump's perspectives on U.S.-China relations through Jensen Huang.

The NYT noted that this issue is highly likely to be on the agenda during President Trump's visit to China next month.

However, President Trump took no separate action after receiving such a briefing about a year ago.

This is analyzed as stemming from concerns over disrupting semiconductor sales by Nvidia—which drives the U.S. economy and stock market—or complicating trade relations with China.

While U.S. officials concluded that Jensen Huang was likely unaware Alice Huang was a Chinese government spy, some senior officials within the Trump administration have raised questions about whether he truly did not know, according to the NYT.

U.S. authorities reportedly did not issue a "defensive briefing" to inform Jensen Huang that he had become a target of a foreign intelligence agency.

Intelligence agencies sometimes withhold defensive briefings if doing so risks exposing their surveillance activities to the spy.

However, the NYT added that it remains unclear which intelligence agency monitored Alice Huang or what specific information she transmitted.

Regarding the matter, Nvidia explained that Jensen Huang and Alice Huang shared a standard professional relationship.

John Rizzo, a spokesperson for Nvidia, stated, "Meeting with customers is part of a CEO's job, and Jensen talks to thousands of customer executives every year," adding, "We are confident that if the U.S. government had determined that a particular individual posed a threat to U.S. industry, they would have informed us."

Liu Pengyu, a spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in the U.S., dismissed the claims as "baseless smears and slanders."

Megaspeed stated, "We take this matter with the utmost seriousness and are doing our utmost to ascertain the relevant facts," expressing its position that it is actively cooperating with the U.S. government investigation.

The White House, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the National Security Agency (NSA) declined to comment.

(Photo: Capture of Netsunder LinkedIn post, Yonhap News)
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.