Intel Community Reportedly Tied Trump’s Favorite AI Boss to a Chinese Spy

Jensen Huang, the CEO of the world’s most valuable company—and a close ally of Donald Trump—is now reportedly at the center of a federal investigation into an alleged spy plot and the smuggling of American AI chips into China. According to the New York Times, the classified investigation previously found evidence that an executive of Megaspeed, a Singapore-based data center company, was an intelligence asset working on behalf of the Chinese government. Not much is publicly known about the executive, whose name is Alice Huang, or Huang Le. She was briefly listed as Megaspeed’s managing director after the company was launched in 2023, but her name was later removed from that role in corporate paperwork, according to the Times. Multiple news outlets reported around this time last year that Alice had been socializing with Jensen (we’ll call them by their first names to avoid confusion), including at the after-party of a tech trade show in Taipei in mid-2024. In a photo from that event shared on LinkedIn, Jensen is a blurry figure, glass of whiskey in hand, enjoying himself as he cavorts with fellow AI executives. Alice, the only woman in the photograph, is elegantly dressed, unsmiling, and sitting statue-like in the background. “Jensen’s interactions with Ms. Huang are not unusual or unexpected,” an Nvidia spokesperson told Gizmodo. “Meetings with customers are part of a CEO’s job; Jensen talks with thousands of customer executives every year.” The spokesperson added that allegations that Megaspeed had been redirecting Nvidia chips to China “were thoroughly investigated and debunked last year.” The news reports from last fall revealed that Megaspeed was under scrutiny from American intelligence agencies for allegedly helping Chinese tech developers skirt U.S. sanctions and get ahold of powerful Nvidia chips. The investigation began in late 2024, according to the Times, after a Commerce Department official visited a Megaspeed data center in Malaysia and noticed that Nvidia chips were sitting in boxes, raising suspicions that they were being sent elsewhere. At the time, the extent of the federal probe into Megaspeed and Alice was not publicly known. The Times’ new investigation claims that American intelligence agencies had been surveilling Alice’s electronic communications, and through a legal process known as “unmasking”—through which American citizens can be identified as part of classified surveillance efforts—it was discovered that Alice had been in contact with the Nvidia CEO. The extent and details of those alleged communications, however, have still not been publicly disclosed. According to the Times, U.S. intelligence agencies have not yet given Jensen a defensive briefing, a precautionary national defense measure sometimes provided to Americans who are being targeted by foreign spies. The reason for that is also unclear; the Times speculates it could be due to concerns that a briefing may have resulted in word getting back to Alice that she was being watched. “We’re confident that if the U.S. government believes that any person is a threat to American industry, it would let us know,” the Nvidia spokesperson told Gizmodo. Jensen has risen to global superstardom in recent years after his company’s AI chips became the critical building block of the AI boom. Since the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, Nvidia’s stock price has skyrocketed by more than 1,250% according to Macrotrends.net, a financial tracking site. More recently, Huang has lobbied aggressively against the regulation of the American AI industry, as well as for the curbing of U.S. sanctions on the sale of advanced AI chips to China. The efforts have been working: In December, the Trump administration gave Nvidia the green light to sell its powerful H200 chips to Chinese buyers—a deal that guaranteed the government 25% of the profits. Jensen was also seated at the table of honor during a White House dinner in September during Chinese president Xi Jinping’s visit to Washington. At a White House summit earlier this month, Trump called Jensen “an amazing man” and awarded him a National Medal of Science. According to the Times’ new report, Trump was briefed last year on the American intelligence agencies’ findings about Megaspeed and Alice’s connections with Jensen, but chose not to act. There was reportedly nothing to suggest at the time that Jensen was aware of Alice’s role as a Chinese agent. But unnamed White House officials told the Times that, in their professional opinion, it’s doubtful that he wouldn’t have known.