Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says ties to company under spying probe were ‘normal’

NEW YORK – Nvidia’s Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang said the chipmaker’s dealings with Megaspeed International were “normal and not unusual” following a New York Times report that one of the Singapore-based firm’s executives is under investigation for spying on behalf of China.Nvidia’s relationship with Megaspeed’s officials was proper, and the chipmaker has checked to ensure that Megaspeed didn’t illegally send its artificial intelligence processors to China, Huang said in an interview on Oct 29. That country is barred from buying Nvidia’s powerful AI chips – known as graphics processing units, or GPUs – under US export rules.“We’ve studied all their deployments of our GPUs and counted every one,” he said in the interview. “And I think the US government also has as well.”The remarks follow a Times story that the US government is investigating an executive from Megaspeed for allegedly providing information to the Chinese government. Huang Le, also known as Alice Huang, has previously been pictured with Nvidia’s leader on social media, and the story reports that she may have been serving as a Chinese agent aiming to evade chip export controls.In the interview, Huang said that his interactions with her were typical of those with Chinese customers and executives. She’s no longer with Megaspeed, he said.“Our relationship, our interactions, have been related to Megaspeed, and it was all completely normal and not unusual,” Huang said. The CEO said he hadn’t been informed by the US government of its suspicions about Huang Le.The growing geopolitical rivalry between the US and China has led to increasing clampdowns by Washington on exports of key American technology. That has cut off Nvidia from a lucrative source of revenue in China, the largest market for chips.The company has received some latitude to ship a limited amount of older AI-related products to the Asian country under the Trump administration. That approval hasn’t resulted in a material amount of shipments, at least in part because Beijing has sought to limit the deliveries itself in an effort to foster its own chip industry.Nonetheless, the restrictions on exports have led to investigations and charges of smuggling of Nvidia’s best products to China – something the company has said is an insignificant issue. Megaspeed is one of a group of companies that Bloomberg News and others have reported may have tried to illegally divert shipments of chips intended for data centers outside of China into that country. BLOOMBERG