Arvind Gupta

I called it a whole year ago‼️ Megaspeed CEO Huang Xiaole (黄小乐) aka Alice Huang, a Chinese businesswoman who had a close relationship with Jensen Huang, was found to be a Chinese intelligence asset funneling information to Beijing. President Trump was briefed and took no action. American spy agencies had gathered striking intelligence. Surveillance of Alice Huang revealed that she had developed a close relationship with Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive. The discovery that Beijing was getting reports from someone with direct access to Jensen Huang set off alarms at the White House. Roughly a year ago, Trump was briefed about the intelligence findings, which have not been previously reported, and chose not to do anything with the information. Trump has been wary of disrupting Nvidia’s chip sales, which are helping to drive the economy and the stock market, and of further complicating the trading relationship with China. American officials already suspected that Alice Huang was helping China evade constraints on its ability to gain access to advanced AI chips. But the revelation that she was feeding information directly to Beijing raised more troubling possibilities. And it left questions about whether she could be gleaning information about Nvidia, which as much as any company accounts for the lead the US has maintained in developing cutting-edge AI models. Jensen Huang has not received a defensive briefing, warnings sometimes given to Americans who are being targeted by foreign intelligence services. The surveillance of Alice Huang continues, and companies that have been affiliated with her continued this year to purchase Nvidia chips. When Trump was initially briefed on the intelligence last year, U.S. officials did not believe the Nvidia executive knew that Jensen Huang was gathering information for the Chinese. It is unclear whether intelligence officials have since updated their assessment, but some senior officials inside the Trump administration doubt that Jensen Huang could have remained unaware of what they had concluded was her intel-gathering role for China. The previous reporting about Alice Huang described her meteoric and somewhat mysterious rise. A Chinese businesswoman and investor, she eventually became a top official with Megaspeed, which the Commerce Department, toward the end of the Biden administration, began to suspect was helping China evade US prohibitions and gain access to the computing power of Nvidia chips. The US government has been investigating Megaspeed since late 2024, when a Commerce Department official visited its data center in Malaysia and found the site to be suspicious. The Nvidia equipment was still packed in boxes, suggesting it was being shipped in or out rather than installed there. Singapore has conducted its own investigation into Megaspeed. In 2025, Singaporean authorities brought Alice Huang in for questioning, but subsequently released her. The Commerce Department investigation into Megaspeed was handed over this year to the Justice Department. Megaspeed is among the firms in Southeast Asia that buy chips to build data centers and then rent their computing power to companies in China. Megaspeed is essentially a middle man. It has bought Nvidia chips from Aivres, the US arm of 🇨🇳 Inspur, which has been blacklisted for funneling technology to the Chinese military, though Aivres remains free of sanctions. Megaspeed has then provided that computing power to Alibaba and other Chinese companies. US officials believe the firm is one piece of a sprawling international effort by Chinese companies to access the chips needed to build and run AI. Investigators suspect that some Nvidia chips acquired by Megaspeed are also finding their way illegally into China. 1/n nytimes.com/2026/10/29/us/po…