Trump Sits on a Spy Warning About Nvidia's Chief

US intelligence officials have concluded that Alice Huang, an executive at the Singapore-based data center company Megaspeed, was a Chinese intelligence asset passing commercial information to Beijing. Officials had put her under surveillance because they suspected her of smuggling Nvidia chips to China. That surveillance showed she had developed a close relationship with Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang.

White House officials are alarmed by her access to the Nvidia chief because of the close relationship he has built with President Donald Trump, according to a New York Times report that cited unnamed sources. Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le, is a Chinese citizen. She is no relation to the Nvidia CEO.

What the surveillance found

Trump was informed about the intelligence findings a year ago and chose not to do anything, the report said. He has been cautious about disrupting Nvidia's chip sales, which may be driving the US economy and the stock market. He has also been wary of further complicating the trade relationship with China.

US officials do not believe Jensen Huang is aware of Alice Huang's intelligence activities. He has not yet been given a defensive briefing, the warning US counterintelligence agencies sometimes give Americans targeted by foreign intelligence services. The surveillance of Alice Huang continues. The report speculates that the briefing may have been held back to avoid alerting her that she was being investigated.

The report rests on people briefed on the intelligence surveillance, none of them named.

The boxes in Malaysia

Megaspeed is an Nvidia cloud partner that builds data centers and rents out the compute to Chinese firms like Alibaba. Alice Huang was listed as its managing director. The investigation into the company began when the US Commerce Department visited its Malaysian data center and found the Nvidia equipment it had ordered still packed in boxes. That raised the suspicion that the machines had either just been shipped in or were about to be shipped out.

The Trump administration restricts exports of advanced AI chips to China as a matter of national security. Nvidia said Megaspeed had already been investigated for evading export controls. "The diversion allegations against this regional cloud were thoroughly investigated and debunked last year," a company spokesperson said.

A LinkedIn post by NetThunder showed Alice Huang sitting beside Jensen Huang with other executives at an informal event around Computex 2024. About a year later, around Computex 2025, she was seen leaving a Taipei restaurant with him and other business associates.

Chips, Trump and Beijing

Jensen Huang has appeared with Trump at state dinners, AI summits and on international trips, all while pushing for certain Nvidia chips to be cleared for shipment to China. Earlier this year the US government cleared Nvidia's H200 chip to be shipped to China, but Chinese regulators prevented the imports.

The Nvidia spokesperson said the Chinese government is not looking for Nvidia products from regional clouds like Megaspeed. "Instead, the PRC government blocked U.S. AI chips, protecting its own industry and resulting in the largest write-offs in U.S. tech history," the spokesperson said. Last year, Nvidia wrote off about $4.5 billion in Chinese-tuned AI chips.

The Chinese embassy in Washington denied the allegations, calling them "groundless smears and slanders" against China.

Nvidia's answer

"Jensen's interactions with Ms. Huang are not unusual or unexpected. Meetings with customers are part of a CEO's job; Jensen talks with thousands of customer executives every year," the spokesperson said. Customers like Megaspeed "receive ordinary business information" and "zero information relevant to national security," according to the company.

Nvidia implied that the US government had not briefed it on Alice Huang. "We're confident that if the U.S. government believes that any person is a threat to American industry, it would let us know," the spokesperson said. "We often receive updates from the U.S. government regarding parties and entities of concern and always act accordingly."

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Marcus Schuler

San Francisco

Editor-in-Chief and founder of Implicator.ai. Former ARD correspondent and senior broadcast journalist with 10+ years covering tech. Writes daily briefings on policy and market developments. Based in San Francisco. E-mail: editor@implicator.ai