What could China get from Jensen Huang?

It’s difficult to overstate Nvidia’s power in today’s AI landscape. The company’s chips are the bedrock upon which advanced AI technology in the US is being built, and demand has consistently outpaced supply for years. Nvidia has also been an influential investor in a wide range of up-and-coming AI companies in recent years, with about $99 billion worth of equity investments in frontier AI labs, neoclouds, infrastructure companies, and more. Its chief executive has even become close with President Donald Trump.

This is why, as both cofounder and longtime CEO of Nvidia, Jensen Huang would be a valuable target for a foreign adversary with sights on the American AI industry.

Huang is in hot water after news broke of his extramarital affair with an alleged Chinese spy. Alice Huang (no relation to Jensen) is an executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore-based cloud provider and a top Nvidia customer. Questions are swirling around how the affair may have influenced Huang’s reported push to sell advanced chips to China — and potentially even influenced President Trump’s own decisions surrounding AI export controls.

US officials believe the Megaspeed executive is a foreign intelligence asset that has funneled information straight to the Chinese government, per The New York Times — in particular, officials reportedly believe that Megaspeed is related to a convoluted web of Chinese companies working together to access chips in bulk and perhaps even illegally get some of those chips into China. Alibaba is reportedly one of Megaspeed’s top customers.

“It’s not entirely surprising that the CEO of arguably one of the most important, if not the most important, AI chip companies is the target of some sort of intelligence-gathering from countries like China,” Hanna Dohmen, a senior research analyst at CSET, said in an interview with The Verge, adding that an alleged spy would potentially be interested in “better understanding what the US government is thinking on export controls,” as well as gathering information on Huang’s conversations with the Trump administration, attempting to influence policy, and gathering information on trade secrets like “who’s buying Nvidia’s chips, who’s getting them first, what’s coming next in terms of AI chips.”

Megaspeed’s sister company, headquartered in Malaysia, spent $4.8 billion or more on Nvidia chips and technology between June 2024 and February 2026, the Times reported, citing trade records from trade platform ImportGenius. The transaction sizes were outside the norm for a small company, particularly when Nvidia chips are so difficult to get.

”Meetings with customers are part of a CEO’s job”

Nvidia spokespeople had said Huang’s relationship with the Megaspeed executive was strictly business. Their interactions were described as “not unusual or unexpected” in statements to the press. Nvidia’s line was, “Meetings with customers are part of a CEO’s job.”

But at some point, their relationship became personal. In June 2024, just before Megaspeed became an Nvidia customer, photos show the two with other AI executives at a bar in Taipei after a local trade show; the following year, they reportedly had a business dinner in Taipei with others as well. But in private, according to US officials cited by the Times, the two’s relationship raised alarm bells for the US government — they had reportedly been surveilling the Megaspeed executive for months, if not longer, and that’s how it came out that she was in close contact with Huang.

The revelation is particularly concerning because of Huang’s lobbying role. He’d been trying to convince the Trump administration and Congress to loosen export controls for sending advanced semiconductors to China, ostensibly so that Nvidia could sell more chips. We now know this was happening around the same time that Huang was spotted at the Taiwan dinner with Alice Huang in May 2025, according to Culper Research, which shorted Nvidia’s stock earlier this year. That dinner occurred shortly after Nvidia had shared the Trump administration’s new restrictions on its China-specific H20 chips in April.

Just a couple months after the Taiwan dinner, Huang reportedly met with Trump in the Oval Office in July 2025 to plead his case for loosening export restrictions on Nvidia’s advanced semiconductors. Days later, the company announced that the administration had blessed sales of its H20 chips to China. Huang had argued that spreading American chips to China would help establish US technology as the standard, rather than allowing for Chinese chips to grow, according to The New York Times. After setbacks earlier in the second Trump term in export policy to China, Huang began speaking with then-White House AI czar David Sacks in 2025, who became the key advocate for Nvidia’s view that selling American chips to China would be beneficial, the Times reported.

By October 2025, Huang was lobbying Trump to allow Nvidia to sell more advanced chips to China, ahead of Trump’s meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, per the Times; but after Trump considered the proposal, he ultimately decided not to move forward. (That same month, Huang hired an external PR firm known for handling sex scandals, Wired reported.)

Months later, in December 2025, Trump changed course slightly, allowing Nvidia to sell H20 chips to a greenlit list of “approved customers” in China, with the US government taking a 25 percent cut of those sales. The same rules would apply to other US chipmakers, he wrote on Truth Social at the time.

“It is in Nvidia’s interest and in Jensen Huang’s interest to lobby for looser export control restrictions”

CSET’s Dohmen said that during the past two years, the US has seen a light loosening of AI export control regulations under the Trump administration, driven partly by Huang’s own lobbying. But it’s important to note, she said, that “even without any kind of intelligence operations from the Chinese side, it is in Nvidia’s interest and in Jensen Huang’s interest to lobby for looser export control restrictions.” Any restrictions by definition stifle Nvidia’s business expansion and cut off potential sales to help it grow its already stunning market cap — which is currently about $4.25 trillion, second only to Apple.

Huang’s relationship with Trump is also particularly relevant here. The president lavished praise on Huang during a speech last year, saying that until recently, he hadn’t even heard of Nvidia, and then he wanted to break it up. But after meeting Huang, he said, he understood why it would be difficult to re-create the company he’d built. More recently, Huang put Trump on speakerphone when the president called him during an appearance onstage at the All-In Summit, publicly displaying his close access to the Oval Office.

This past spring, a classified memo — the writing of which was overseen by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, per the Times — circulated among Trump administration officials ahead of the president’s trip to China in May, warning of the Megaspeed executive’s alleged involvement in surveillance on behalf of China’s Ministry of State Security. Her reported goal was to learn about advanced AI chips in the US and try to influence them being made available to China on a large scale. Asked if he had known about the memo reviewed by Rubio at a press briefing on Monday, Trump said, “I’d certainly check with the intelligence people. It could have been mentioned. Certainly it didn’t make much of an impact on me.” Earlier in the briefing, he said he was unaware of the alleged spy connection ahead of his trip to China.

Huang was initially left off the list of executives joining Trump on the trip, but the president later asked him to join. Trump had been briefed about a year ago that US intelligence believed the Megaspeed executive to be a China intelligence operative, according to the Times, and that she had a close relationship with a US citizen who turned out to be Nvidia’s CEO. At the time, he reportedly chose not to take action.

So far, the allegations haven’t affected Huang’s future at Nvidia. He’ll continue to lead the company during the investigation. Trump has also stood by him since news broke of the affair, telling reporters this past weekend, “I think he’s an honorable guy. I think he probably has an excuse for it. You have to hear it.”

Nvidia said it had “no reason to believe that either national security or Nvidia secrets were compromised”

On Sunday, Huang wrote an internal memo to Nvidia employees — some of which are his own family members — writing, “I owe my family and all of you an apology. I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry.” He then addressed Nvidia’s board, partners, and shareholders, adding that he is “fully committed” to leading the company and “will work to earn back your confidence.” This weekend, Nvidia’s board of directors launched an independent investigation into the national security allegations. Huang will not have control over the participants in the investigation, and Nvidia said it had “no reason to believe that either national security or Nvidia secrets were compromised.”

Morningstar senior equity analyst Brian Colello wrote in a note on Monday that Morningstar “can’t rule out the investigation fading away and Nvidia returning to business as usual,” particularly since Huang is the “only CEO the company has ever known.” There’s also the fact that Huang’s Nvidia struck deals in August with six large financial institutions to provide more than $500 billion in financing for the buildout of AI data centers and other infrastructure, and as the US-China AI race intensifies, those are high-stakes agreements.

“It’s unclear to us what these partnerships and financing deals would look like with a different Nvidia CEO,” Colello wrote. “Costs of capital may rise for future investments if perhaps the most prominent CEO in the AI landscape is no longer orchestrating such deals.” Morningstar still maintained a very high uncertainty rating for the company, with Colello writing that it’s possible US approval of Nvidia to sell H20 chips to China will be revoked and that the company could ostensibly be sanctioned as well.

Trump told reporters on Sunday that Huang should remain CEO of Nvidia and that he would “certainly take him” on his next trip to China. “I haven’t heard he’s done anything wrong,” Trump told reporters. “He dealt with somebody, but you know, so does everybody else.”