US intelligence: China’s Ministry of State Security recruited Alice Huang to spy on Jensen Huang

US intelligence agencies assess that Alice Huang, a former executive at Nvidia customer Megaspeed, was employed by China’s Ministry of State Security to gather intelligence on Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang. US intelligence officials also believe the two had a romantic relationship.

The New York Times reported on Friday (6 November), citing sources, that US intelligence officials submitted a memorandum to senior policymakers in the Donald Trump administration this spring alleging that Alice Huang was involved in a Beijing intelligence operation. Its aim was to learn more about US artificial intelligence (AI) chips and to influence Nvidia to supply its most advanced chips to China.

The Financial Times reported the same day, citing sources, that US intelligence officials believed the two had been romantically involved, and that the memorandum was circulated to a small number of senior administration officials before Trump’s visit to Beijing in May this year.

Megaspeed, which is registered and operates in Singapore, is an Nvidia cloud partner. According to reports, Megaspeed buys Nvidia AI processors and other equipment to set up data centres in Southeast Asia, then rents computing capacity to Alibaba, effectively providing a back door for Chinese AI developers to use Nvidia’s high-end chips.

Nvidia said in a statement that its cloud partners “do not ask us to seek changes in US law or advocate for sales to China”. It also stressed that anyone seeking classified information through its cloud partners would have hit a dead end, as the company does not share classified information with customers.

Responding to the Financial Times report, Nvidia cited Jensen Huang’s earlier statement that his relationship with Alice Huang was purely a business relationship.

Liu Chang, a spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in the US, said the New York Times report was “unsubstantiated” and “nothing but smears against China”.

The New York Times first reported on 29 October that Alice Huang had passed information to Beijing. US intelligence agencies had subjected her to electronic surveillance for at least a year and found that she had close ties with Jensen Huang. Authorities briefed Trump last year, but he chose not to act openly.

Jensen Huang said at the time that Nvidia’s business dealings with Megaspeed were “normal and not unusual”, and that the company had investigated to ensure Megaspeed had not illegally shipped Nvidia AI processors to China.

The matter has drawn renewed attention after the Democrats won control of both chambers of Congress in this week’s midterm elections. Republicans have also begun scrutinising the relationship between the two persons.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee, the Select Committee on China and the Intelligence Committee jointly wrote to Jensen Huang on Thursday (5 November), saying the reports raised significant national security concerns. They asked him to attend a closed-door briefing on 18 November to explain the matter to Congress.

The latest New York Times report alleged for the first time that Alice Huang was employed by China’s Ministry of State Security. It said the agency, established in 1983, had previously received little attention from Beijing’s leadership until President Xi Jinping assumed the country’s top post in 2012, at which point Beijing began allocating resources to it. It is now several times the size of the US Central Intelligence Agency, gathering human intelligence, intercepting electronic communications and conducting counter-espionage operations.

Former CIA counterintelligence analyst Peter Mattis said Chinese intelligence agencies had made technology a priority, viewing it as “the key fight for dominance in the economic world”.

He said, “Jensen is someone you’d want to influence because he wields a lot of power and is at the crux of a world-shaping technology.”