US intelligence officials say China’s MSS recruited Alice Huang to spy on Jensen Huang

This is a new development in a story we reported earlier: House Republican Committee chairmen ask Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang for closed-door China briefing.

American intelligence officials believe Beijing’s Ministry of State Security recruited Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le, to gather intelligence on Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang. The New York Times investigation that originated the public reporting said officials suspected Huang of gathering information about Nvidia and its advanced AI chips, and possibly seeking to influence export policy toward China.

Nvidia pushed back on the characterization. Spokesman John Rizzo described the meetings as ordinary and part of the chief executive’s standard customer outreach, and the company said the chief executive’s dealings with Alice Huang were ordinary and consistent with his regular customer meetings.

China’s embassy rejected the reporting entirely. Spokesman Liu Chang said the reporting is unsubstantiated, and the embassy called the claims “nothing but smears against China.”

Her reported work history covers AI infrastructure, investment management, banking and television journalism, and she is a Chinese citizen. She was reportedly managing director of Megaspeed International, an AI computing and data center firm based in Singapore, and held that role until at least 2023. The two share a surname but are not related.

Investigators found that Megaspeed leased computing capacity to Alibaba and operated data centers across Southeast Asia. That setup gave Chinese companies an indirect path to advanced computing power even though US rules bar direct sales of advanced processors to China. Companies and investors tied to Huang, based in Shanghai and Zhejiang province, have financial links to China Electronics Technology Group Corporation, or CETC, through an investment in one of its cybersecurity units.

Photos placed them together at a Taipei bar in June 2024. Those familiar with US intelligence say Beijing’s Ministry of State Security recruited Huang to gather details on Nvidia’s AI chips and to influence policy on exporting them to China. The classified US assessment says the relationship between the two allegedly moved past business into romance, and US intelligence agencies watched it closely for more than a year.

During that same period, Megaspeed began purchasing advanced Nvidia chips valued in the billions of dollars. A classified American intelligence memo describes an alleged Chinese industrial espionage operation aimed at Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang.

Republican House committee leaders Brian Mast, John Moolenaar and Rick Crawford asked for a private briefing with Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang on Nov. 18, 2026. The session will cover his dealings with Alice Huang and protections against foreign intelligence threats. House Foreign Affairs Committee members expect the chief executive to take part in the closed-door session. The chairs of the Select Committee on China and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence are also involved.

The closed-door session concerns national security questions about his relationship with Alice Huang. President Donald Trump reportedly received a briefing on the matter last year and decided against intervening. The Financial Times reported that senior officials saw a circulated intelligence memo describing the alleged relationship just before the Beijing summit with President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

According to the Financial Times, neither Jensen Huang nor Lori Huang has commented publicly, and Nvidia declined to discuss the alleged relationship directly. Alice Huang has not answered requests for comment. The CIA and White House declined to comment to The Times.

Nvidia said regional cloud customers receive ordinary business information rather than sensitive trade secrets or national security material, and it declined to comment on that Financial Times report. The company said customers do not press it to urge the US government to change policies on chip sales to China, and Rizzo said Nvidia does not give classified information to customers.

Nvidia ranks as the world’s most valuable company, producing many of the chips that power AI data centers and underpinning AI tools from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. US rules currently bar the sale of its most advanced chips in China. The company does not sell its Blackwell line of AI GPUs to China.

Huang advocated Blackwell sales to China in 2025, but Trump never signed off on the idea. He persuaded Trump in 2025 to permit more GPU exports to China and later agreed to sell limited quantities of a less powerful chip there. Jensen Huang said by May that Rubin, which succeeds Blackwell, should not be exported to China.

The FBI says China keeps finding new methods to obtain US state secrets, including tricking job seekers on LinkedIn into writing intelligence reports about US-Chinese relations. Chinese officials reportedly asked Alice Huang to urge Jensen Huang to push for sending some of Nvidia’s most advanced GPUs to China as a stretch goal. According to The New York Times, Alice Huang was under US surveillance for at least a year.

The GB300 leads Nvidia’s Blackwell-generation processors, which deliver 7,500 teraflops of FP4 computing performance and draw roughly 1,400 watts. The next-generation Rubin platform is expected to reach as much as 66,700 teraflops in top-end configurations.

Shortages of high-bandwidth memory and Western limits on advanced extreme ultraviolet lithography tools constrain China’s semiconductor industry. Huawei’s Ascend 910C series and newer Ascend 950 models trail Nvidia by three to four years in features and capabilities.

Huawei’s CloudMatrix 384 links hundreds of chips in one enormous system, providing 49 terabytes of memory and the capacity to run Chinese AI models such as DeepSeek and Qwen. A Huawei system of that type uses around 559 kilowatts, compared with roughly 120 kilowatts for Nvidia’s NVL72 system.

CUDA, Nvidia’s dominant software development platform, is another major advantage for the company. Shifting workloads to Huawei’s competing CANN ecosystem can take months of software adaptation and lower system efficiency.

Megaspeed said its current leadership takes the matter seriously and commits to establishing the facts. Congressional pressure complicated an arrangement under which Nvidia might sell advanced chips to China for a 25% government charge.