Suspected Chinese spy got close to Jensen Huang – Trump knew, NYT says

Felix Laurent 29 Oct 2026 5 min read

Big tech

US intelligence agencies concluded that Alice Huang, an executive at Nvidia customer Megaspeed, was passing information to Beijing. Surveillance showed she had a close relationship with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, The New York Times reported on October 29. President Trump was briefed about a year ago and took no action. A Megaspeed affiliate in Malaysia bought at least $4.8B in Nvidia-based equipment between June 2024 and February 2026.

What the Times reported

The woman at the center of the report, Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le, is a Chinese citizen. She first drew attention in a probe of Megaspeed, a Singapore-based data center company. Investigators wanted to know whether it was steering advanced Nvidia AI chips into China. Officials later concluded she was a Chinese intelligence asset. Despite the shared surname, she is not a member of Jensen Huang's family.

Trump was briefed on the findings roughly a year ago. That briefing had not been reported before. According to the Times, he chose not to act. He was wary of disrupting Nvidia sales, which help drive the economy and the stock market. He also did not want to strain trade relations with Beijing further. The White House, the CIA and the NSA declined to comment.

That decision matters because of who sits on the other side of the relationship.

Why the Jensen Huang link worried officials

On that side stands Jensen Huang, who has direct access to Trump. In June he told the Associated Press that the president sometimes calls him late at night. They talk about jobs, manufacturing and national security. Huang also attended the September 24 state dinner for Xi Jinping. Officials feared a contact close to him could learn how Trump thinks about China policy. She could also gather information about Nvidia itself.

When Trump was briefed, officials did not believe Jensen Huang knew what Alice Huang was doing. Some senior administration officials now doubt he could have been unaware. It is unclear whether the formal assessment has changed. Huang has not received a defensive briefing. That is the warning usually given to Americans targeted by a foreign intelligence service.

Surveillance of Alice Huang continues, according to the Times. Companies linked to her kept buying Nvidia chips this year. Officials have not said whether protecting the surveillance was the reason no warning was given.

The intelligence finding grew out of a chip investigation that had been running for two years.

Megaspeed and the $4.8B Nvidia chip trail

That investigation began at the Commerce Department in late 2024, near the end of the Biden administration. An official visited the company's data center in Malaysia. Nvidia equipment there was still sitting in boxes. That suggested hardware was moving through the site rather than being installed. Singapore ran its own probe and questioned Alice Huang in 2025 before releasing her. This year the Commerce case moved to the Justice Department.

The Times describes Megaspeed as an intermediary. It buys Nvidia chips from the US arm of Inspur, a Chinese server maker. Inspur's parent company is on a US blacklist for supporting the Chinese military. The US arm itself is not sanctioned. Megaspeed then rents the computing power to Alibaba and other Chinese companies. Investigators suspect some of the chips are reaching China illegally.

Megaspeed was under scrutiny before this report. In late 2025 Bloomberg cited customs data from Malaysia and Indonesia. It showed billions of dollars in Nvidia imports by a company less than two years old. Later Bridge Data Centres, a Malaysian operator owned by Bain Capital, reassigned 68.4MW of capacity it had allocated to Megaspeed. Nvidia still lists Megaspeed as a cloud partner. Megaspeed advertised the relationship as recently as October.

Everyone named in the story disputes the picture it paints.

What Nvidia, Megaspeed and Beijing say

Nvidia's answer is that nothing unusual happened. Spokesperson John Rizzo called the contacts ordinary, since chief executives meet customers. He said customers such as Megaspeed receive only routine business information. Nvidia is confident the government would alert it to any real threat to American industry. The company also said its own earlier review found no evidence that Megaspeed smuggled chips.

Megaspeed's current leadership said it takes the allegations "extremely seriously". The company has hired outside counsel for an internal investigation and told the US government it will cooperate. A person familiar with the company said Alice Huang has become less active since the US probes began. Corporate filings listed her as managing director for eight months before removing her. She did not respond to requests for comment.

Liu Chang, a spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy, called the US actions "groundless smears and slanders."

These denials arrive while Nvidia's position in China is already weak.

Nvidia's China business was already shrinking

Huang has spent the past year trying to change that, lobbying to loosen limits on chip sales to China. He negotiated a deal that gives the US government a 25% cut of certain Nvidia chips sold there. Current and former officials told the Times that his ties to Trump have slowed efforts to tighten those limits. Some investigations and proposed sanctions have stalled at the Commerce Department.

The sales those limits allow have been modest so far. IDC data cited by the Motley Fool shows a 44% drop in Nvidia's data center AI chip shipments to China. The figure compares the first half of 2026 with a year earlier. Huawei reached 28% of that market against Nvidia's 34%. Nvidia got licenses to ship limited volumes of H200, but Chinese restrictions blocked part of them. The company took a $400M charge on excess H200 inventory.

Demand has not disappeared. Reuters reports that ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent ordered more than $35B worth of RTX PRO 5500 cards. Still, Nvidia's $108B guidance for the current quarter assumes no China data center revenue.

That leaves the main open question: what changes for Nvidia now that the briefing is public.

What the spy report means for Nvidia

The first answer may come from new rules. The administration is weighing tighter rules for offshore data centers that serve Chinese companies, according to Yahoo Finance. Megaspeed's model is exactly that: renting Nvidia compute to Chinese clients from Southeast Asia. Gregory Allen, a former Pentagon AI policy official, wrote on X that Nvidia and Huang have repeatedly declined to testify before Congress. He predicted those requests "will become subpoenas very, very soon." No lawmaker had made a public statement on the report by the time of writing.

The report does not show that Jensen Huang knowingly helped Chinese intelligence. It rests on unnamed sources, and Nvidia, Megaspeed and Beijing reject its claims. What it describes is a gap between an intelligence finding and a policy response. For Nvidia, the near-term question is how Washington will treat middlemen that sell its compute to China.

Nvidia is not the only AI company facing this. On October 9 the FBI arrested Abdulrahman Alfozan, a former OpenAI engineer and Saudi national. He is charged with planting a recording device in an executive meeting room in San Francisco. Prosecutors say he messaged a member of the Saudi royal family throughout 2025 and 2026. The Saudi consulate in Los Angeles offered to cover his bail in full. A judge kept him in custody, calling the offer a "blank check." Prosecutors have not tied the Saudi government to the device itself.

Both cases remain open. The Justice Department probe of Megaspeed continues, and Alfozan has not been tried. As advanced chips gain strategic weight, more cases like these may follow.