Sources say Alice Huang, a senior executive at an Nvidia cloud partner with close ties to Jensen Huang, is suspected of passing information to Beijing, and the New York Times reports US intelligence believes Chinese spies targeted Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.
Multiple sources claim that a top executive at a Singapore AI firm, who is suspected of steering Nvidia AI GPUs to China and has close business ties with Jensen Huang, was apparently passing information to Beijing as a Chinese intelligence asset. According to The New York Times, U.S. intelligence has been aware of her activities for over a year and has even briefed President Donald Trump on the situation. However, Trump reportedly chose not to act on the information, as he apparently did not want to affect Nvidia sales or antagonize China.
The suspect, Alice Huang or Huang Le, was listed as the managing director of Singaporean AI firm Megaspeed, an Nvidia cloud partner that builds data centers and rents out compute to Chinese firms such as Alibaba. The investigation into the firm began when the U.S. Commerce Department visited Megaspeed's Malaysia data center and found Nvidia equipment that it had ordered still packed in boxes. This raised suspicion that the machines had either just been shipped in or were about to be shipped out, rather than installed at the site. However, it remains unclear what led U.S. intelligence agencies to investigate Ms. Huang. Megaspeed was accused of helping smuggle $2 billion worth of Nvidia chips last year.
Ms. Huang has been seen in public with the Nvidia chief on several occasions. She was photographed sitting beside Jensen Huang and other executives at an informal event around Computex 2024, in a LinkedIn post by NetThunder, identified as Megaspeed Chairwoman Alice Wong. About a year later, around the time of Computex 2025, she was again seen with Jensen Huang leaving a restaurant in Taipei with other business associates.
"Megaspeed has been no different than many other regional cloud customers. Jensen's interactions with Ms. Huang are not unusual or unexpected. Meetings with customers are part of a CEO's job; Jensen talks with thousands of customer executives every year," an Nvidia spokesperson told Tom's Hardware. "Our regional cloud customers receive ordinary business information — not sensitive NVIDIA trade secrets — and zero information relevant to national security."
Still, the possibility that Chinese intelligence is targeting a senior figure close to President Trump is reportedly troubling some U.S. officials.
The Chinese embassy in Washington denied the allegations, calling them "groundless smears and slanders" against China. Nevertheless, it would also make sense for Beijing to keep tabs on senior executives of the top American firms that arguably single-handedly fueled the AI boom. Given Jensen Huang's status as a celebrity CEO, it is not surprising that he is surrounded by people from both the U.S. and China. Sources cited in the report say Mr. Huang has not yet received a defensive briefing, a warning that U.S. counterintelligence agencies sometimes give to American citizens who have been targeted by foreign intelligence services, even though surveillance of Alice Huang continues. The report speculates that this may have been done to avoid alerting Alice Huang that she was under investigation.
As for Jensen, U.S. officials do not believe he is aware of Ms. Huang's intelligence activities. "We're confident that if the U.S. government believes that any person is a threat to American industry, it would let us know," Nvidia told Tom's Hardware. "We often receive updates from the U.S. government regarding parties and entities of concern and always act accordingly."