How China Tried to Spy on Nvidia's CEO

You know how in the art world, the forger is never the one who sells the painting? There's always a respectable middleman with good dinner-party manners. Hold that thought, because today's story runs on exactly that.

Okay, I'm listening, but where are we?

Chips. This morning, Thursday the twenty-ninth of October, the New York Times reported that US intelligence agencies concluded a woman with a close business relationship to Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang was acting as a Chinese intelligence asset.

Close how? Because that word is doing a lot of work.

Deliberately, I think. The Verge pointed out this morning that the reporting is actually sparse on exactly how close. What we have is that she's an executive at a Singapore data center company called Megaspeed, and she's been photographed with him at trade show parties, dinners and events in Taiwan.

And the name?

Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le. Chinese citizen, no relation to Jensen Huang. And here's the part that made Washington sit up: Trump was briefed on this roughly a year ago, and according to the Times, he chose not to act.

A year? Why would you sit on that?

The reporting says he was wary of disrupting Nvidia's chip sales and of straining the trade relationship with Beijing. Those sales are propping up a lot of the stock market right now.

So the spy story was weighed against the share price and the share price won.

That's how the Times frames it, via people briefed on classified intelligence who spoke anonymously. Nobody's on the record.

Alright, back up. Who is Alice Huang? Because I've never heard of her and apparently neither had anyone.

Almost nobody had. The Telegraph says she had a low profile before taking the top role at Megaspeed. Reportedly she'd worked for a Chinese state media company and a Shanghai-based investment firm.

Chinese state media. That's... not nothing.

No, but it's also not proof of anything on its own. Lots of people pass through state media in China. What's stranger is the company. Megaspeed was incorporated in Singapore back in twenty fifteen under a completely different name: Seven Road International. It was spun off from a Chinese gaming business.

A gaming company becomes an AI data center company. That's a swerve.

It renamed itself Megaspeed in March twenty twenty-three, which is exactly when Huang Le came on board as managing director. And then the ownership gets passed around. First to a company called Huang Le Limited, then in November to a newly incorporated firm called Swiftdata.

Wait, she resigned as a director?

By the tenth of November twenty twenty-three, yes, per Singapore corporate records reported by the Business Times. Her name comes off the paperwork, but she's still the face in the photographs.

That's the forger thing you opened with. The name on the document and the person in the room are different people.

And then this little unknown company commits to buying two billion dollars of Nvidia AI technology.

Two billion? From a firm whose revenue estimates were all over the place?

Some listings put it somewhere between one and ten million dollars as of September twenty twenty-five. That gap is what got Washington's attention.

So how did anyone actually catch this? Satellite? Informant?

Cardboard boxes. Commerce Department officials visited Megaspeed's data center in Malaysia and found the Nvidia hardware still sitting in its packaging, uninstalled.

That's it? Nobody unpacked the servers?

If you're genuinely renting out compute, that gear is racked and humming within weeks. Boxes mean it either just landed or it's staged to leave. Megaspeed was accused last year of helping smuggle two billion dollars of Nvidia chips.

Accused by whom, though? I want to be careful here.

Fair. The Commerce investigation was first reported by the Times back on the ninth of October twenty twenty-five. Singapore police separately confirmed they were investigating the company for suspected breaches of local law. And around that time, Megaspeed essentially went dark. Reporters calling the company got a dead ring tone.

Okay. And what does Nvidia say to all this? Because they can't love today.

They pushed back hard. Their spokesperson said Jensen's interactions with Ms Huang are not unusual or unexpected, that meetings with customers are part of a CEO's job, and that he talks with thousands of customer executives every year.

Which is true and also exactly what you'd say either way.

They went further. They said regional cloud customers get ordinary business information, not trade secrets, and zero information relevant to national security. And on the smuggling: quote, the diversion allegations against this regional cloud were thoroughly investigated and debunked last year.

Debunked. That's a strong word from a company that isn't the investigator.

They also implied the government never briefed them, saying they're confident that if the US government believed someone was a threat to American industry, it would let them know. And China's embassy in Washington called the whole thing groundless smears and slanders.

What about Jensen Huang himself? Was he in on anything?

Nothing in the reporting suggests that. Officials told the Times they don't believe he knew. And he's apparently never received a defensive briefing, the standard warning you'd give an American who's been targeted.

They never warned him? For a year?

The speculation in the reporting is that warning him might tip her off, because the surveillance is still running.

So she may still be operating right now.

As far as anyone's said publicly, yes. And the timing matters, because this lands weeks before Trump's planned trip to China, where chip exports are expected to be on the agenda.

So what do we actually watch for?

Whether the White House says anything, whether Singapore's investigation produces charges, and what Nvidia's export picture looks like after that trip. The company already wrote off about four and a half billion dollars in China-tuned chips last year.

Honestly, the thing I can't shake is the boxes.

Same. If you want the other half of this, look at the Singapore fraud case, three men charged over servers that went to Malaysia. That's the plumbing underneath all of it.

Right. I'll go read that tonight and sleep badly.