The spy who shagged? US intelligence believes Alice Huang, a Chinese businesswoman who befriended Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang while her company bought billions of dollars' worth of his AI chips, was spying for China's Ministry of State Security. Last spring, a memo that circulated among top Trump's policymakers said she had been recruited to learn about American AI chips and possibly influence the Nvidia chief to push for China to get the company's most advanced processors.
Jensen Huang is a close Trump ally and the Republican leaders of three House committees have now asked him to explain his dealings with his namesake in a closed-door briefing later this month.
US export rules keep Nvidia's best chips out of China, and he has spent years pushing Washington to let the company sell more of its technology in the country.
US intelligence agencies had kept Alice Huang, a Chinese citizen, under electronic surveillance for at least a year. The report also stated that President Trump was briefed on the relationship last year but chose not to act. The two Huangs are not related.
Her company, Megaspeed, began buying chips in 2024, around the time she and Jensen Huang were photographed together at a bar in Taipei. Many in the industry were surprised because the company had no visible track record in the field.
Megaspeed has been building data centers in Southeast Asia and renting their computing capacity to Alibaba. Nvidia can't ship its top data center chips to China, but renting offshore capacity lets a Chinese company run workloads on that same hardware without importing it. The setup effectively allows Chinese companies to access computing power that they cannot import directly under US export controls.
Alice Huang belonged to a cluster of companies and investors based around Shanghai and Zhejiang Province. That group used its connections with Shanghai officials to move from mobile video games into data centers. It also has a financial tie to China's defense sector through an investment in a cybersecurity subsidiary of China Electronics Technology Group, a major military technology maker.
People who have met her say she speaks fluent English and attends industry conferences and private executive dinners. Besides Jensen Huang, she knows the leaders of Gigabyte, a major assembler of Nvidia-based supercomputers.
Peter Mattis, a former CIA counterintelligence analyst who now leads the Jamestown Foundation, said the ministry sees technology as "the key fight for dominance in the economic world."
– Patrick Moorhead (@PatrickMoorhead) November 7, 2026
"They're interested in what's taking place in technology, in the technical specifications of what's being built and in shaping decision-making as it relates to those things," Mattis told the New York Times. "Jensen is someone you'd want to influence because he wields a lot of power and is at the crux of a world-shaping technology."
Nvidia spokesman John Rizzo said the company does not share classified information with customers. He also said customers do not ask Nvidia to press Washington to change its chip policy on China. He said Beijing had "consistently promoted its own domestic alternatives in China, including Huawei, and strictly limited imports of our data center products."
Rizzo has described Jensen Huang's meetings with Alice Huang as "not unusual," noting that the CEO speaks with thousands of executives who do business with Nvidia each year.
Liu Chang, a spokesman for the Chinese embassy, called the reporting "unsubstantiated" and "nothing but smears against China." Alice Huang did not respond to repeated requests for comment. The White House and the CIA declined to comment.
Jensen Huang argues that selling in China would let Nvidia compete with Huawei and slow its progress. In 2025 he persuaded Trump to reverse a ban and allow sales of a less capable Nvidia chip. The two later agreed to let Nvidia sell its second-most-powerful chip in China, with the US government taking 25% of the revenue. Trump also considered approving Blackwell, Nvidia's newest architecture, but dropped the idea.
At an investor conference in May, Jensen Huang said China should not get Blackwell or the upcoming Rubin chip. He said the United States should have "the first, the most and the best, but simultaneously all American companies should compete globally."
The Ministry of State Security was founded in 1983 and spent years behind the People's Liberation Army's spy and hacking units in Beijing's pecking order. That began to change after Xi Jinping took power in 2012 and put money into the ministry. It took on more of China's espionage work after a 2015 US-China agreement to rein in cyber operations. The Justice Department later accused hackers linked to the ministry of trying to steal US technology.
By 2023, the ministry had become a rival to the CIA and was using AI to pick and profile targets. It is estimated to have hundreds of thousands of agents, far more than the United States has counterintelligence officers. China aims to lead the world in AI by 2030.
The ministry's current head, Chen Yixin, is from Zhejiang and served under Xi when the now-president ran the province in the early 2000s. In a September essay in the state-run magazine China Cyberspace, Chen said China needed to assert control over AI, and that algorithms would help countries "gain the initiative on the battlefield."