Nvidia defends billionaire Jensen Huang in China spy report

Nvidia Corp. has defended its billionaire chief executive officer, Jensen Huang, after a report that U.S. intelligence officials concluded a Chinese businesswoman who built a close relationship with him was gathering information for Beijing, and that President Donald Trump was told about it roughly a year ago but did not act.

The woman, Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le, is a Chinese national and a former senior executive of Megaspeed, a Singapore-based data center company that buys Nvidia’s artificial intelligence chips and rents out computing power, including to Chinese companies. She has not been charged with any crime, and neither has Megaspeed. U.S. officials did not believe Jensen Huang knew she was collecting information for China, according to people familiar with the classified intelligence. No one has accused him of wrongdoing.

Nvidia said the contacts were routine. “Jensen’s interactions with Ms. Huang are not unusual or unexpected,” Nvidia spokesman John Rizzo said. “Meetings with customers are part of a C.E.O.’s job; Jensen talks with thousands of customer executives every year.” The company said customers such as Megaspeed receive ordinary business information, not trade secrets or anything tied to national security, and that it was confident the government would tell it if it believed someone was a threat to American industry.

Huang, 63, called Nvidia’s business with Megaspeed normal on Oct. 29 and said the company had checked how the cloud provider used its chips. “We’ve studied all their deployments of our GPUs and counted every one,” he said. He added that Alice Huang no longer works at Megaspeed.

What officials found

U.S. surveillance of Alice Huang turned up her contacts with Jensen Huang and led officials to conclude she was passing information to Beijing, according to people familiar with the intelligence. Officials worried she could gain access to sensitive Nvidia technology or insight into Trump’s thinking on chip exports to China. The two were photographed together at a bar in Taipei in June 2024 and were seen at a business dinner in May 2025.

Trump was briefed on the findings about a year ago. The administration took no action, and Jensen Huang never received a defensive briefing, the warning U.S. agencies sometimes give Americans who are being targeted by a foreign intelligence service. The White House, the CIA and the National Security Agency declined to comment.

Alice Huang did not respond to requests for comment. Megaspeed said it takes the matter seriously, has hired outside lawyers to run an internal investigation and has told U.S. authorities it will cooperate. China rejected the report. Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun called it “baseless and purely slanderous,” and the Chinese Embassy in Washington described U.S. accusations as “groundless smears and slanders.”

Megaspeed under investigation

The U.S. began looking at Megaspeed in late 2024, when a Commerce Department official visiting its data center in Malaysia found Nvidia equipment still sitting in boxes. Investigators suspected some of its chips were reaching China in breach of U.S. export rules, which bar the sale of Nvidia’s most advanced processors there. A Malaysian sister company of Megaspeed bought at least $4.8 billion of AI equipment containing Nvidia chips between June 2024 and February 2026, according to trade records. Singapore authorities questioned Alice Huang in 2025 and released her.

Senator Tom Cotton asked the Commerce Department in October 2025 to investigate Megaspeed, and the Justice Department took over the case this year. Nvidia said earlier claims that Megaspeed helped Chinese buyers evade U.S. restrictions “were thoroughly investigated and debunked last year.” Megaspeed remains a listed Nvidia cloud partner.

The report lands at a sensitive time for Huang, who has become one of Trump’s closest business allies. He persuaded the president to allow some chip sales to China in exchange for the U.S. government taking a share of the revenue, and he was a guest at the White House state dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping in September. Trump personally owns Nvidia shares.

Born in Taiwan, Huang moved to the U.S. as a child and co-founded Nvidia in 1993. He has run the company ever since, turning a maker of graphics cards for video games into the dominant supplier of the chips used to build AI systems. His stake in Nvidia has made him one of the richest people in the world.