China’s Ministry of State Security (M.S.S.) reportedly recruited a woman to spy on Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, one of the world’s richest men, President Donald Trump’s favorite AI CEO, and the key player in next-generation GPUs needed for AI training and processing, the New York Times reported on Friday.
Previous reports have indicated that the woman, known by the names Alice Huang or Huang Le, was listed as Singapore-based Megaspeed’s managing director until at least 2023. The aim of the Nvidia operation, the Times wrote, was to learn more about Nvidia’s most advanced hardware. Chinese officials also allegedly tasked her with persuading Huang to lobby for shipping some of the company’s most advanced GPUs to China as a sort of stretch goal. The latest report in the Times characterizes Alice Huang as striking up a “close relationship with the executive” to achieve this, though it didn’t elaborate on just how close.
The operation dates to at least 2024, when both Huangs (who are not related) were photographed together, and Megaspeed began a rapid expansion, the Times reported. The Times reported last week that Alice Huang was under U.S. surveillance for at least a year.
“To many in the industry, the well-funded push by Megaspeed into A.I. appeared to come out of nowhere,” the Times noted. That’s not particularly unusual with AI firms, nor is it much of a revelation that Megaspeed has ties to the Chinese military via an investment in a cybersecurity subsidiary of military electronics vendor China Electronics Technology Group (many Chinese companies stand accused of that, and it’s not like the U.S. military isn’t forming a Venn diagram with its tech sector too). What is notable is that a senior executive with the firm reportedly worked directly for the M.S.S. during that period of rapid growth.
The Times piece noted sources say Alice Huang also has relationships with the leaders of Taiwanese hardware manufacturer Gigabyte, which is one of the major assemblers of Nvidia chips. Megaspeed also builds data centers in Southeast Asia with Nvidia chips and rents the capacity to Alibaba to achieve a limited end-run around U.S. export controls, the Times wrote.
It’s ultimately unclear how much influence the alleged spy exerted or how successful she was. However, Jensen Huang did successfully petition Trump in 2025 to allow more GPU exports to China, and later struck a deal to also sell limited quantities of its second-most-powerful chip there. (The U.S. government takes a highly unusual 25% cut of sales in an arrangement that seems flat-out illegal.)
Jensen Huang has argued the sales are a way to pressure China-based competitor Huawei. Nvidia doesn’t sell its most powerful AI GPU line, Blackwell, to China, but not for lack of trying—Jensen Huang advocated Blackwell sales in 2025, but Trump never signed off on the idea. By May of this year, Jensen Huang said Blackwell and its successor Rubin should not be exported to China.
Notably, the Times piece mentions that intelligence agencies briefed Trump on the relationship between the two Huangs last year “but [he] chose not to do anything about it,” which sounds about on par. It’s also not clear when Jensen Huang learned of the spy effort. Republicans in Congress have sought Jensen Huang’s presence for a closed-door briefing on the espionage effort on Nov. 18; if he was briefed by an intelligence or counterintelligence agency like the CIA, NSA, or FBI, that information of course would not necessarily be public.
Nvidia spokesperson John Rizzo told the Times that Nvidia doesn’t share classified information with customers, and those customers don’t ask it to lobby the president for export deals. He also said the Chinese government has “consistently promoted its own domestic alternatives in China, including Huawei, and strictly limited imports of our data center products.”
Rizzo added the interactions between the Huangs were “not unusual” and the Nvidia CEO meets with thousands of executives each year. A Chinese embassy spokesperson called the reports “unsubstantiated” and “nothing but smears against China” in a statement to the Times, while Alice Huang didn’t respond to requests for comment. The CIA and White House unsurprisingly didn’t comment to the Times.
