Three senior Republican leaders in the US House of Representatives have formally written to artificial intelligence (AI) chip giant Nvidia’s chief executive Jensen Huang, asking him to attend a closed-door briefing in Congress on 18 November. They want him to explain media reports of his close ties with a former executive at a Singapore technology company who is suspected of gathering intelligence for the Chinese government.
In a letter sent on 4 November, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Brian Mast, House Select Committee on Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party Chairman John Moolenaar and House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Eric Crawford said recent reports of China gaining access to sensitive US technology and information had raised significant national security concerns.
Congress must therefore determine the extent to which US national security has been threatened and understand Nvidia’s security protocols against espionage by foreign adversaries.
Responding to media queries, an Nvidia spokesperson stressed that Huang speaks with thousands of customer executives each year. The company’s cloud customers in Asia receive only routine business information, not sensitive trade secrets or core technology related to US national security.
Nvidia said it regularly receives updates from the US government about individuals and entities of concern and has always acted accordingly. The spokesperson said in a statement: “We’re confident that if the US government believes that any person is a threat to American industry, it would let us know.”
The committee led by Mast oversees sales of AI chips. He has repeatedly clashed with Nvidia over export control policy. In January this year, he accused Nvidia of lobbying hard to sell millions of chips to Chinese companies and challenged Huang to debate the issue on Fox News.
The New York Times reported on 29 October that US authorities were investigating Alice Huang, a former executive at Singapore-based cloud computing services company Megaspeed.
Megaspeed buys AI chips from Nvidia. US authorities have been scrutinising Megaspeed on suspicion that it helped Beijing obtain high-end AI chips banned from export to China. According to the report, US intelligence agencies believe Alice Huang is an intelligence operative who passes information to Beijing. While monitoring her, the authorities discovered that she had close ties with Jensen Huang.
Responding to the reports that same day, Jensen Huang said routine contact between the two companies was normal business activity. He said Nvidia had conducted comprehensive checks and a detailed inventory of the graphics processing units (GPUs) delivered to Megaspeed, confirming that Megaspeed had not unlawfully re-exported high-performance chips to China.
Singapore’s Ministry of Home Affairs subsequently issued a statement on 31 October clarifying that neither the Singapore government nor its officials had ever expressed concern about former Megaspeed executive Alice Huang’s close ties with Jensen Huang or her alleged provision of intelligence to China. The authorities had also never investigated her ties to China.
