U.S. investigated Chinese spy plot aimed at Nvidia CEO

A top executive of a Singapore AI cloud firm that was accused of illegally selling Nvidia chips to China could also have been a Chinese spy, anonymous sources told the New York Times.

The executive, Alice Huang (or Huang Le), worked for Megaspeed, and was photographed as one of multiple people hanging out of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang during various business dinners in the Singapore region. U.S. intelligence agencies had been surveilling Alice Huang to learn more about her ties with China for about a year, the Times reports.

The concern, sources said, was that Alice Huang had grown so close to Jensen Huang, that she could have been gathering information about Nvidia’s plans and the CEO’s efforts to convince the Trump Administration to allow it to ship more advanced technology to China.

But an Nvidia spokesperson denied this, telling TechCrunch that the CEO’s relationship with the Megaspeed executive was the same as with any other regional customer.

“Jensen’s interactions with Ms. Huang are not unusual or unexpected. Meetings with customers are part of a C.E.O.’s job; Jensen talks with thousands of customer executives every year,” the spokesperson said in an emailed statement. The company also said “Our regional cloud customers receive ordinary business information—not sensitive NVIDIA trade secrets—and zero information relevant to national security.”