Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, Nov 9: China on Monday rejected allegations based on some US newspaper reports that it spied Nvidia Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Jensen Huang. China described the allegations as “unsubstantiated” and a “smear campaign” against Beijing.
“The so-called Chinese spy allegation is unsubstantiated. It is nothing but smears against China,” China’s Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said in a statement.
The controversy erupted after a report in the New York Times that Huang had developed a “close relationship” with a Chinese citizen and businesswoman named Alice Huang, believed to be an intelligent asset for China. The Nvidia CEO has admitted of having an affair with Ms Huang and also apologised to his wife and son, saying he has no excuse for what he did.
“I was unfaithful to my wife,” he said in a message to company employees. “My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry.” Later, Nvidia said the company’s board has no “reason to believe that either national security or Nvidia secrets were compromised”, assuring that it would launch an investigation into the case. Despite this assurance, Nvidia shares dropped around 5 per cent in pre-market trading on Monday.
According to media reports, Huang in recent years had pushed loosen chip sales restrictions to China. He also lobbied for US President Donald Trump to allow his company to sell H200 chips this year, but there is no clarity whether Beijing would allow Chinese companies to buy these chips en masse.
Nvidia said earlier this year in a filing in August that it sold only a small amount to China as such sales are restricted by the Chinese government.
While those chips are not Nvidia’s most cutting-edge models, they are still advanced. Previously, Huang also lobbied Trump to sell the less-advanced H20 chips, which were designed for the Chinese market while complying with U.S. export restrictions.
Chinese media have largely focused on Huang admitting to the affair and state media outlets have mainly echoed the official government line. Some have said the New York Times report was aimed at destabilizing U.S.-China relations. “Whenever China-US relations begin to improve, there are often those firing shots from the shadows,” the state-owned Global Times said.
Nvidia is the world leader in making chips for AI data centres, and play a major role in providing the critical hardware for the development of large language models. Powerful AI tools like Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, Meta’s Muse, and OpenAI’s GPT exist today because of Nvidia’s graphic processing unit (GPU) chips.
Accessing Nvidia’s GPUs to build powerful AI models started becoming difficult for Chinese companies since 2022 as Washington doubled down on measures to tighten controls on who can access advanced chips.
The first big move came in October 2022, when the U.S. Commerce Department blocked the A100 and H100 chips from being sold to China. Nvidia then responded with a China-specific versions of the chip — the A800 and H800.
Washington closed that gap a year later, and Nvidia designed the H20 to fit under the new thresholds. Each round of rules produced a new workaround, and each workaround produced a new round of rules. China, however, was never a passive bystander. Even back in 2020, China’s market regulator approved Nvidia’s $6.9 billion purchase of the Israeli networking firm Mellanox on the condition that Nvidia keeps supplying GPUs to Chinese buyers. In effect, Nvidia was caught between two governments making opposite demands.
The chips that Washington has tried to keep away from China were finding their way across the border anyway. According to some reliable research reports, restricted Nvidia GPUs, worth about US$13.4 million, were routed via Vietnam, India and Malaysia to Hong Kong and China between 2022 and 2025.
It also found Chinese universities and research institutions, most with ties to the government or defence industry, buying restricted chips bundled inside larger contracts.
With Mr Huang’s romantic relationship with the woman coming out in the open, Nvidia said it was investigating the CEO after he told the board he had been intimate with a customer, Alice Huang, whom U.S. intelligence determined was a Chinese spy.
Ms Huang is employed at Megaspeed International, a subsidiary of a Chinese gaming company 7Roads. It is a multi-jurisdictional entity, meaning it has registered corporate offices in different countries, including Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore.
Its primary business is focused on cloud computing service, data processing and infrastructure hosting, a massive cloud vendor that provides computing space for companies that are unable to set up their own racks of Nvidia GPUs. According to media reports, Megaspeed is the largest Southeast Asian importer of Nvidia’s GPUs — with a total of $4.6 billion in imports from 2023 to 2025.
On LinkedIn, the company’s handle has 557 followers, and describes the cloud vendor as provider of “massive GPU scale on fast, flexible infrastructure” and that it is a premium business partner of Nvidia “strategically positioned in the Asia Pacific region.”
A quick search for ‘Alice Huang’ revealed an image of an Asian woman who looked very much like the person seen with Nvidia chief Huang at a restaurant in a now viral video footage. Ms Huang has listed herself as the CEO of Megaspeed International in her LinkedIn profile.
In a LinkedIn post, the company has denied the accusations and said it has undergone multiple on-site inspections and reviews in the past six months by the Bureau of Industry and Security of the U.S. Commerce Department, the Ministry of Investment, Trade and Industry of Malaysia, and NVIDIA.
“These thorough investigations have confirmed that there has been no evidence of any violations concerning the illicit transfer of chips or any illegal activities, and this demonstrates that we are a compliant and legitimate company,” it said.
But the NYT report claims that Ms Huang was sharing information with Beijing. But the Nvidia board has said it has no reason to believe that national security or Nvidia’s secrets were compromised, though its outside counsel will examine all available information.
Mr Huang will keep running the company, and he will not take part in choosing the investigators. President Trump, for his part, brushed it off, saying Mr Huang “dealt with somebody,” and that he would still take him on his upcoming trip to China.