Nvidia CEO Admits To Affair With An Accused Spy For The Chinese Government

On Sunday, Nvidia announced that it was opening an investigation into CEO Jensen Huang after he admitted to an affair with a Singapore-based data-center company executive named Alice Huang (no relation) who U.S. officials say is also working as a spy for Chinese state intelligence. Given the size of Nvidia as well as its strategic centrality to the intense AI buildout competition between the U.S. and China, Huang might be the single most desirable person in the tech industry, if not the whole world, for Beijing to honeypot. According to reporting around the matter, it seems like they got what they came for.

We must begin with the crux of the issue, which is the matter of why Nvidia is in such a central position. AI software companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have gotten significantly more media attention because they make consumer products and engage in marketing rhetoric about their potential to create the machine god, but Nvidia is the company that has made the most actual money during the ongoing AI boom. Nvidia makes chips, supposedly the best of all the chips, which every big-time software company built its flagship platforms on a few years ago. This has made Nvidia the second-biggest publicly traded company in the world, and has made its founder and CEO Jensen Huang fabulously wealthy and quite the influential figure.

It's also made the Santa Clara–based Nvidia the most critical part of the U.S.'s strategic plan to assert global AI dominance, by which I mean dominance over China, its principal competitor in the field. American trade policy forbids Nvidia from selling its best stuff to Chinese companies: U.S. policymakers want American companies to build the biggest and best data centers and create AI software that can most effectively and profitably book a flight for you, tell you some stuff you love about your kid, or conduct microtargeted drone assassinations of restive labor organizers.

That's great for the U.S., though not necessarily for Nvidia. As an entity the chipmaker doesn't really care who "wins" the AI race; it wants to sell chips to whoever can pay the most for them or buy the most of them, and Anthropic and OpenAI have recently made moves to curtail their dependence on Nvidia chips. In turn Jensen Huang has persuaded Donald Trump to roll back several restrictions on chip sales to China, and though he was unsuccessful in his efforts to sell the best Nvidia stuff to Chinese companies, Nvidia is allowed to sell its second-best chip to Chinese companies that have been vetted by Commerce Department.

But why settle for the H200—which is "the first GPU with HBM3E," allowing its "larger and faster memory" to fuel "the acceleration of generative AI and large language models (LLMs) while advancing scientific computing for HPC workloads"—when, through alternative means, you can get your hands on Blackwell, whose "GPUs pack 208 billion transistors and are manufactured using a custom-built TSMC 4NP process" and which "feature two reticle-limited dies connected by a 10 terabytes per second (TB/s) chip-to-chip interconnect in a unified single GPU"?

This brings us to Alice Huang and Megaspeed. Per the Wall Street Journal, Alice Huang worked as a reporter for Chinese state TV before working in finance and eventually leading the company Megaspeed International. That company was created in 2023 when 7Road, the Chinese state–affiliated developer of mobile-game-hell standouts such as Island Story: Let's Boom!, Dragon Oath, and Mythic Glory, spun off its international operations. Based in Singapore and primarily operating in Malaysia and Indonesia, Megaspeed builds data centers.

In October 2025, Nvidia drew scrutiny from U.S. regulators when it sealed a $2 billion deal to sell chips to Megaspeed; Nvidia claims it looked into the company and didn't see anything suspicious, but it had no incentive to actually do that. The New York Times, meanwhile, did, and found a bunch of shady stuff. The Commerce Department opened an investigation into Megaspeed in 2025, shortly after news broke that DeepSeek, the flagship Chinese AI company, had trained its model using an estimated 20,000 Nvidia chips it shouldn't have had access to. DeepSeek got those chips not by buying them directly from Nvidia, but by smuggling them via Singapore.

Nvidia is not run by people who are stupid about international business. Its market cap is close to $5 trillion and it enjoys extremely close ties to the highest levels of the U.S. government. You'd have to be pretty naive to think that anybody there would believe that a Singapore-based arm of a Chinese company was buying some $4.8 billion worth of chips over two years to simply build data centers in Malaysia. And again, Jensen Huang has no overriding incentive not to sell his chips to Chinese companies. He and the venture capitalist David Sacks have even argued for the strategic wisdom of making Chinese companies reliant on Nvidia. If he did in fact sell Nvidia's chips to Megaspeed knowing they would make their way to China, he may have been enticed to do so by Alice Huang.

Intriguingly, Jensen Huang and Alice Huang were photographed together several times in Taiwan when the Megaspeed deal was announced in 2025. An executive for NetThunder named Peter Schmitt told the Times at the time that Alice Huang was bragging about how she could essentially summon Jensen Huang. "She said, 'I bet you guys I can get Jensen here,' and then Jensen immediately showed up," Schmitt said. There are a lot of photos of them together.

The AI industry is rife with fear about foreign spies running honeypot operations. Seducing an Anthropic employee, gaining their trust, and looking at their phone is a pretty simple way to access sensitive corporate secrets, perhaps simpler than hiding a microphone in a conference room, as OpenAI and the FBI accused Abdulrahman Alfozan of doing on behalf of Saudi Arabia last month. Given the astronomic value of trade secrets and the tight circumscription of the industry within San Francisco, there's never been a better time to engage in corporate espionage. And there's never been a bigger target than Huang.

Jensen Huang's relationship with Alice Huang has been under scrutiny for some time. The Nvidia CEO maintained his innocence last month, saying that everything was "completely normal and not unusual." However, the Times reported on Sunday that U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio had overseen the drafting of a "highly classified memo" based on electronic surveillance of Alice Huang, which warned top Trump officials that she was a spy. That report meant Jensen Huang would face pressure from U.S. Congress and the Nvidia board, leaving him with no choice but to admit the affair had happened, as he did in a Sunday message to Nvidia staff.

Jensen Huang denied that cheating on his wife had any national security implications, though a Times report on Monday cast some serious doubt on that claim. Per the Times, Nvidia went out of its way to squash that Commerce Department investigation into Megaspeed's connections with the Chinese state, and succeeded in having the investigation shuffled away from Commerce and under the aegis of Trump's servile Justice Department, which effectively killed it.

"I just know [Jensen Huang]'s a fine person, but you never know what’s going on," Trump said when asked for comment on the Huang-Huang affair. "I think he's an honorable guy. I think he probably has an excuse for it." Rousing defense, sir! Speaking of doing an amazing job for one's country, I think we have to say Alice Huang crushed it and Beijing should put her jersey in the rafters.