US intelligence agencies reportedly believed that NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang had a romantic relationship with a Chinese businesswoman who was reportedly recruited by one of China’s top intelligence agencies to spy on him.
A report by the New York Times said that the woman, Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le, was recruited by China’s Ministry of State Security to collect Information on the CEO as part of a drive by the agency. Jensen Huang is also an influential ally of US President Donald Trump and is one of the leading figures in the AI race.
They reportedly wanted to learn more about US AI chips and potentially influence the company to push for its most advanced GPUs to be made available in China. The US had restricted NVIDIA from selling the chips directly to China. They were later allowed to sell lower performance chips to China.
The report said that Huang Le struck up a close relationship with the executive to achieve this. She was photographed inviting Jensen Huang to a drinking session in Taipei, Taiwan, in 2024.
US intelligence agencies have already been focused on China’s interest in Huang.
The allegations against Huang Le have drawn interest from the Congress, and three House committees have asked the NVIDIA CEO to appear at a closed-door hearing at the end of this month.
Last week, the NYT reported that US agencies were conducting electronic surveillance of Huang Le for about a year. Trump was reportedly briefed about Jensen Huang and his relationship with Alice Huang last year but chose not to do anything.
She speaks English well and has relationships with executives in the AI chip industry, including with the leaders of Gigabyte and the assemblers of NVIDIA Supercomputers. She has also attended industry conferences and private executive dinners.
It is not clear when the two Huang met. In 2024, around the time two of them were photographed together at a bar in Taipei, her company, Megaspeed, made a multibillion dollar purchase of AI microchips.
Many in the industry saw Megaspeed’s push into AI as sudden.
Huang Le was also connected to a network of companies and investors in Shanghai and Zhejiang province. She reportedly used their ties to local officials to push from mobile video games into data centres.
Mega speed has been building data centres in south-east Asia and renting them to Alibaba, the Chinese internet giant, giving them a backdoor way to access to advanced Nvidia chips.
The allegations emerge as Jensen Huang has continued to urge the US government to ease restrictions on exports of AI semiconductors to China.
