November 11, 2026
Last week a rather interesting assault was launched against the founder and CEO of Nvidia, Jensen Huang.
It is based, in parts, on facts that have been long known. On top of that have come some unverifiable 'spy' allegations.
The facts, as far as known:
Nvidia is making specialized GPU chips for AI processing. Until recently it has had a near monopoly and thus gained a very important role. As CEO of the company Jensen Huang has been its main salesman.
Since 2022 the U.S. has restricted the sales of GPUs to China. Nvidia has been against such restrictions. They diminish its sales but, even more importantly, have induced China to create competing products.
What the U.S. did not restrict was the sale of Nvidia GPUs to countries outside of China even when those chips would be used, via remote access, by Chinese companies.
Alibaba, China's Amazon equivalent, therefore arranged, via some non-Chinese subsidiaries, funding for a neocloud company in Singapore to build data-centers filled with Nvidia GPUs to be accessed by Alibaba from China. The neocloud company's name was Megaspeed which was for some time led by one Alice Huang (who is not related to Jensen Huang).
Over the years, Megaspeed has bought some $2-3 billion of Nvidia equipment. In 2024 Nvidia's total revenue was some $130 billion and has grown since. Megaspeed was a noticeable but not critical customer for Nvidia.
During business trips in Asia Jensen Huang met Alice Huang, the CEO of his Singapore customer Megaspeed. They developed a relationship.
In October 2025 the New York Times reported of U.S. government scrutiny about the Singapore company's relation with Nvidia:
After splitting off from a Chinese gaming company in 2023, Megaspeed set up a subsidiary in Malaysia that quickly snapped up nearly $2 billion worth of Nvidia's most advanced products.
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Megaspeed has funneled those chips to data centers in Malaysia and Indonesia that appear to remotely serve customers in China. That is not necessarily illegal, but it can be found unlawful if it is done on behalf of a Chinese company. U.S. officials have also been scrutinizing whether Megaspeed diverted some of those chips on to China, in violation of U.S. law, two people familiar with the company said.
The NYT did some research. The neocloud company seemed to be a bit murky but no evidence was found to substantiate those smuggling claims.
The story included some hints about a relation between Jensen and Alice Huang:
It is not clear when Mr. Huang and Ms. Huang, who are not related, first met. She was mingling with a crowd of tech executives just after midnight at the Taipei bar in early June of last year when she offered to ask Mr. Huang of Nvidia to join them, recalled Parker Schmitt, an executive who was with the group.
"She said, 'I bet you guys I can get Jensen here,' and then Jensen immediately showed up," Mr. Schmitt said, referring to Mr. Huang by his first name. Photos posted to LinkedIn by NetThunder, a data software provider where Mr. Schmitt is chief executive, show Mr. Huang at the bar with the group.
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Mr. Huang and Ms. Huang were photographed together again in May, exiting a restaurant in Taipei with an Nvidia aide after a business dinner with other A.I. suppliers.
In late 2025 Bloomberg also reported of allegations, never proven, that Megaspeed had smuggled Nvidia GPUs it had bought in Singapore to China. That did not make much sense as the company has always been free to rent out its GPU capacity to Chinese companies:
Megaspeed denies any wrongdoing and says it abides by all regulations from the US and elsewhere relevant to its operations.
"Megaspeed is a Singapore-based company, operating fully in compliance with all applicable laws, including US export control regulations," the firm said in an emailed statement. It declined to comment further, instead directing Bloomberg to its website and to Nvidia.
An Nvidia spokesperson said its inquiry into Megaspeed found no evidence of diversion and showed that the company is fully owned and operated outside of China, with no China shareholders. Megaspeed is offering "a cloud service permitted under the export control rules," the spokesperson said.
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Bloomberg didn't find evidence that any of Megaspeed's Nvidia chips have been diverted to China, or that the company has otherwise violated US export controls or other laws.
As there was nothing nefarious found, the reporting on Megaspeed died down. There was no known U.S. government action on the issue.
It was revived only recently after a well coordinated leak of 'intelligence' which claimed that Alice Huang may have been used as a spy.
The first hint came via an NY Times 'Exclusive' report on October 29:
Nvidia Chief Seen as Target of Chinese Spy Plot ( archived)
A Chinese businesswoman who had a close relationship with Jensen Huang was found to be passing intelligence to Beijing. President Trump was briefed and took no action.
A top executive at a Singapore-based data center company was under scrutiny for possibly steering advanced Nvidia A.I. chips to China. And now American officials had concluded that she was a Chinese intelligence asset, funneling information to Beijing.
But what came next was even more alarming. Surveillance of the executive, Alice Huang or Huang Le, a Chinese citizen, revealed that she had developed a close relationship with Jensen Huang, Nvidia's chief executive.
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When Mr. Trump was initially briefed on the intelligence last year, U.S. officials did not believe the Nvidia executive knew that Ms. Huang was gathering information for the Chinese.
On November 6 the NY Times added this:
China's Top Spy Agency Recruited Woman Who Targeted Jensen Huang ( archived)
A memo that circulated among top policymakers in the Trump administration last spring cited intelligence that a Chinese businesswoman who had a close relationship with Nvidia's chief executive was a spy for China's Ministry of State Security, according to people briefed on the intelligence.
The businesswoman, Alice Huang, was recruited to collect intelligence on Jensen Huang, Nvidia's chief executive, as part of a drive by Beijing's top spy agency to learn more about American A.I. chips and potentially influence the company to push for its most advanced chips to be made available to China, the people said.
The same story was given to the Financial Times:
US believes Nvidia's Huang had romantic relationship with alleged Chinese spy ( archived)
The US government believes Nvidia's chief executive Jensen Huang had a romantic relationship with a Chinese woman who was recruited to spy for China's main intelligence agency, according to people familiar with the matter.
US officials earlier this year wrote a memo, based on information obtained by American intelligence, which said Huang had been romantically involved with Alice Huang, an executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore-based customer of the US chip group, said people familiar with the memo.
The US intelligence community believes that Alice Huang was recruited as a spy by China's Ministry of State Security intelligence agency, according to people familiar with the matter.
The memo was shared with a small group of top US officials shortly before President Donald Trump flew to Beijing for a summit with Xi Jinping, according to people familiar with the matter. The White House and CIA declined to comment.
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The New York Times reported last week that Mr. Huang was a target of a Chinese intelligence operation, and that U.S. intelligence agencies were conducting electronic surveillance of Ms. Huang, a Chinese citizen, for at least a year. The Times reported that Mr. Trump had been briefed last year about Mr. Huang's relationship with her, but chose not to do anything about it.
A day later the NY Times hinted that Secretary of State Marco Rubio was the source of the allegations:
Secretary of State Marco Rubio oversaw the drafting of the highly classified memo this spring warning top Trump administration officials that Nvidia's chief executive, Jensen Huang, was in a close relationship with a Chinese spy, multiple people briefed on the matter said.
I wonder what this 'spy' story is really about.
While Jensen Huang has technical knowledge he is by far too remote from the myriad details of chip production to make him a valuable target for technology espionage. There is also no need to push him to argue against export restrictions to China. Nvidia, in its own interest, has always favored unlimited trade.
Alice Huang may well have had talks with Chinese authorities. (Not only in China do business people with 'interesting' business contacts in 'enemy' countries regularly have such chats.) But I find it unlikely that she was specifically tasked with targeting Jensen Huang. Her role is too elaborate.
The controlled leak about the relation between the two Huangs, and the completely unverifiable spy allegations on top of that indiscretion, likely have a different purpose.
A number of people dislike Jensen Huang, who is from Taiwan, for his ethnicity. They dislike his control over Nvidia and the sky-high prices of its chips. There are people, like Anthropic leader Dario Amodei, who argue for harsher restrictions on Chinese open source AI models.
Removing Jensen Huang from Nvidia would probably tank the company at the center of the AI bubble. It is not a good motive. So the target may be Jensen Huang but he may not be the only one.
There are others, like Marco Rubio, for whom anything China is always the enemy. To leak this now may be designed to cripple Trump and/or to sabotage the upcoming Trump and Xi summit. Rubio wants to run in 2028 and the hawks he needs as support behind himself like such interventions.
Meanwhile, Jensen Huang has admitted that he has had an intimate relation with Alice. For now he will stay at the top of his company while its board investigates the 'spy' allegations.
We will have to wait for the next leak to drop to then dive deeper into this rabbit hole.
Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.