U.S. intelligence agencies have for more than a year surveilled Alice Huang, an executive at a Singapore cloud firm with close ties to Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang, because they suspect she is a Chinese intelligence asset, The New York Times reported on Wednesday, citing people briefed on the surveillance. The Times said President Donald Trump was briefed on the matter but chose not to act, apparently to avoid disrupting Nvidia's sales or antagonising Beijing. Nvidia pushed back hard the next day, and no charges have been filed.
Alice Huang, who is not related to Jensen Huang, is listed as a managing director of Megaspeed, an Nvidia cloud partner that builds data centres and rents compute to Chinese firms including Alibaba. The company was already under scrutiny: U.S. investigators grew suspicious after Commerce Department officials visited Megaspeed's Malaysia data centre and found ordered Nvidia equipment still sitting in boxes, raising the question of whether the machines were about to be shipped elsewhere. Megaspeed was accused of helping smuggle $2 billion in Nvidia chips last year. The two Huangs have been photographed together at least twice, around Computex in both 2024 and 2025.
Nvidia disputed the framing in statements to CNBC and Tom's Hardware. A spokesperson called Megaspeed an ordinary regional cloud customer and said Jensen Huang's contact with its officials was unremarkable, because he meets thousands of customer executives a year. Such customers, the company said, receive "ordinary business information, not sensitive Nvidia trade secrets, and zero information relevant to national security." Nvidia added that the diversion allegations against Megaspeed were "thoroughly investigated and debunked last year," and said it trusts the government would warn it if any individual posed a threat. The Chinese embassy in Washington called the report "groundless smears."
The episode sits on top of a fault line Nvidia has walked for two years. Its chips are both the essential input for AI development worldwide and a central bargaining chip in the U.S.-China contest, and Jensen Huang has cultivated access to Trump while lobbying for permission to sell certain chips into China. According to the Times account, U.S. counterintelligence has not given Huang a defensive briefing, the warning sometimes offered to Americans targeted by foreign services, possibly to avoid tipping off Alice Huang that she is under investigation. Officials do not believe Jensen Huang is aware of her alleged activities.
Much of the report rests on anonymous sourcing about classified surveillance, and the two sides describe different realities: intelligence officials worried enough to brief the president, against a company that says the underlying smuggling claim was already closed. The near-term facts are plainer. Washington earlier cleared Nvidia's H200 for export to China, only for Chinese regulators to block imports in favour of domestic chips, a move Nvidia says drove the largest write-offs in U.S. tech history, about $4.5 billion. The surveillance of a figure close to both Huang and Trump adds a counterintelligence dimension to a relationship that was already one of the most scrutinised in the industry. Whether it changes U.S. export policy, or Nvidia's China strategy, is the question the report leaves unanswered.