Did Jensen Huang Know? Nvidia's CEO and an Alleged Chinese Spy

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has admitted to an affair with Alice Huang, a Megaspeed executive US intelligence believes was recruited by China's Ministry of State Security. Her alleged goal: get Jensen to lobby Washington to loosen export controls on AI chips. Ejaaz walks through how we got here, from a party in Taipei and a $2 billion GPU deal to a classified memo, Jensen's email to staff and the Nvidia board's investigation.

We also cover the bigger questions: did Jensen know, why the Commerce Department didn't act, the web of companies buying Nvidia chips near China, Jensen's case for selling chips to China, and the four fronts of the US-China AI race: chips, power, people and models.

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Timestamps
00:00 Jensen Huang's Spy Scandal
02:26 Who Is Alice Huang?
04:14 The Memo and the Plane
04:59 The Story Breaks
05:33 Jensen's Email
06:17 Did She Influence Him?
07:34 Nvidia's Board Responds
08:30 The Megaspeed Web
10:25 Why Didn't Commerce Act?
12:04 Jensen's China Argument
15:04 Chips vs Compute
16:14 China's Four Fronts
18:25 Shenzhen and What's Next
19:53 Final Thoughts

#ai #nvidia #jensenhuang #china #chips

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Creators and Guests

Host

Ejaaz Ahamadeen

What is In the Loop AI?

Exploring the frontiers of Technology and AI

So here's a sentence I never thought I'd say. Jensen Huang, the CEO of the most

valuable company in the world, NVIDIA, has admitted to having a romantic affair

with a Chinese spy, to the extent where he may

either intentionally or unintentionally have leaked state, national security,

and AI secrets to one of the biggest adversaries to America.

And that's not even the craziest part of the story. The Chinese spy,

Alice Huang, yes, she shares the same surname as Jensen.

Her whole intended goal was to influence Jensen to lobby the US government to

loosen export controls on NVIDIA chip sales to China.

And that's exactly what happened. To date, NVIDIA has sold tens of billions

of dollars worth of AI chips to China, whether intentionally or unintentionally

knowing about it. And that's the big question mark here.

Did Jensen know or did he not? I recall multiple times over the last six months

where Jensen Huang has openly advocated for selling more chips,

more NVIDIA GPUs to China.

And he's been largely quite successful. Over the last recent few weeks,

the US government has given him the ability to do so.

So whether he's done this intentionally or not is an open question.

The other thing that doesn't add up is apparently the US Commerce Department

and US Intelligence has known about this for a while, but didn't inform Jensen

Huang or didn't put a stop to it.

In fact, to this date, the company that the Chinese spy was working for is still

listed as an official partner to NVIDIA. So technically, they can still continue to buy GPUs.

And then of course, there's the whole downfall from this entire escapade,

which is not even related directly to this, which is.

Jensen's relationship, his questionability around whether he is still competent

enough to be the CEO of NVIDIA, which

by all means and purposes has been the bedrock and singular pillar that has

held the entire AI capex bubble and economy together, but also the fact that

his fallout with his spouse, with his wife, might also result in indirectly a $73 billion,

NVIDIA share sale.

So there's lots to unpack on today's episode, including the wider implications

of what all of this means in the AI race, when we have nation states going to

the extent of committing subterfuge to try and undermine the US's ability to

remain at the number one pole position.

Things are getting serious. So let's get into today's episode brought to you by Qualcomm.

Okay, so this all starts off with this lady called Alice Huang or Huang Le,

who bears no relation whatsoever to Jensen.

And she's grown close with Jensen since about 2024, where she's the executive

at this company based in Singapore known as Megaspeed.

Now, Megaspeed, its stated description is it is a cloud AI infrastructure company.

So a neocloud, basically a company that buys a lot of GPUs and provides cloud

services via that to companies that want to either train or inference their

models. We're talking about this a bunch of times on the show.

But the difference here is this is based in one, Southeast Asia,

and two, Singapore only. So it has technically on paper, no affiliation with China.

And Jensen Duong has been pictured.

Pretty frequently with this lady, Alice Huang, since around 2024.

There's been multiple videos, multiple photos of them, in some cases getting a little bit close.

But the idea here was that, okay, he has a close relationship with a bunch of different executives.

And this is one of many partners that he's trying to kind of have a close affiliation

with so that he can sell them more GPUs.

Now, even back in 2024, there were still question marks around how Megaspeed

was even able to afford buying the GPUs. GPUs aren't inexpensive.

They're extremely expensive.

And there was no kind of ties to how Megaspeed was able to generate revenue.

And suddenly going from around 10 million ARR, they went to purchasing around

$2 billion worth of NVIDIA GPUs in 2025.

So I think that's when the US government started to at least investigate or

accusations or rumors started to surface, but nothing was really done at the

time. And NVIDIA actually launched an investigation to say, okay,

listen, we're going to look into this.

They looked into it and it returned basically zero results. They were like,

it's fine. We're going to continue selling GPUs to them.

And then things really came to a boil earlier this year in spring, where

one of the US government representantes basically filed a private memo to Trump

and basically said, listen,

Jensen Huang, I think, is in a romantic relationship with a Chinese spy,

which means that we can't bring him on the visit to China.

And that's, initially, I remember talking about this episodes ago,

was why Jensen Huang was actually left off of the list to go to China.

No one knew at the time, there were speculative rumors, but no one actually

knew that this was tied to this particular accusation.

What actually ended up happening is on the day of flying out to China,

Trump actually reversed that decision and said, ah, Jensen, you should just come along anyway.

And so Jensen Huang went along and no one was none the wiser.

Now, fast forward to today, or rather last week, the story broke out.

I think it was in the New York Times where they basically said, according to U.S.

Intelligence, we have valid proof that Jensen Huang is in a romantic affair

with a Chinese spy and she has been detained.

Now, the immediate Chinese response has been that this is baseless and these

accusations are completely false, but apparently there's sufficient evidence to counter this.

And we had the actual final blow over the weekend where Jensen Huang shared

a mass email to his employees admitting the affair and warranting the concerns.

It's actually quite an intense email to read. He goes, I owe my family and all

of you an apology. I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our

children. There's no excuse for this.

He goes on to say that throughout my life, my family has given me love and support

and addressing the actual concern. He says regarding the national security concerns

raised in the news reports, NVIDIA's board of directors has initiated an independent investigation.

I support the investigation and will cooperate fully. I love our country and

our company and I'm committed to protecting NVIDIA and supporting America's national security.

I'm proud and grateful to be American. So he's taken the side that he had no

idea that Alice Wong was a Chinese spy, that he thought he was having an affair,

and he didn't actually thought he was leaking state secrets.

Now, my immediate reaction to this is, okay, cool, that might have been the case.

But also, why were you advocating so hard to loosen the export controls to selling

chips to China, given that you were very closely affiliated with this person

in the first place? Did she influence you innocently and you were naive?

Or was it the case that Jensen genuinely knew about this, which would be a wider,

more darker implication? Now, if you ask me, my initial gut reaction is.

I think Jens Hwang is a patriot, an American patriot.

I think that he cares very deeply about building this tech in America.

And actually, if you look at any of his decisions around using TSMC,

but also working very hard to onshore a lot of

chip manufacturing and making sure that America maintains the GPU lead,

he's quoted multiple times actually saying that it's very important that the

US commands and maintains the lead.

You could argue that, yeah, that this is the case and that he was,

I hate to use the word innocently, because there's nothing really innocent about

the affair, but like innocently not leaking secrets intentionally to a Chinese spy.

But either way, it doesn't look great at all for Jensen.

And this is undoubtedly going to suck a lot of reputational power,

legitimacy, trust that he's going to eventually need to rebuild, as he says in his email.

Now, the second important statement to read here is from the NVIDIA board of

directors who, for all intents and purposes, is meant to keep Jensen accountable,

and now is launching an independent investigation.

And they go, listen, the NVIDIA board is initiating an independent investigation

in light of recent reporting that the founder and CEO Jensen Twan has been the

target of foreign intelligence effort, a committee of independent directors

assisted by outside independent counsel will oversee the investigation.

While the board has no reason to believe that either national security or NVIDIA

secrets were compromised, the board's inquiry will examine all available information.

And then the final sentence, which is very important to read.

The board has confidence in Jensen and his leadership team and will provide

further updates as appropriate.

There's no specific lean either way as to whether they want to keep Jensen Huang

as the CEO of NVIDIA. And of course, that's the big question mark,

which will be presumably answered

over the next couple of weeks once this investigation has been done.

Now, what's important to note here is that this doesn't just concern one company,

Megaspeed, there's an entire web of companies that has now been uncovered.

Now, if we take Megaspeed as kind of like the top layer of this entire thing.

Jensen Huang has advocated multiple times, and I cannot emphasize this enough,

that mega speed is good for the money and that they have no associations with

China. In fact, the quote I have here is he goes,

They are wholly owned and operated by a company based and headquartered outside

of China with no China shareholders. And he's advocated presumably because he

has a close relationship with the woman that he's having an affair of,

which was a high-powered exec at this company.

And what doesn't add up is between 2023 and 2024, Megaspeed's revenue went from

around 30 to 34 million dollars per year to billions of dollars worth of liabilities.

And no one seemed to question how they were able to afford the GPUs or where

this money was coming from in the first place.

And actually, if you unpack this kind of like layer of like owners and where

this comes to, you'll end up unpacking a series of other companies.

There's like one called Apex, I think, and a series of other companies that

were doing very similar things. In fact, I believe there was a company called

Magic Infra. Yeah, this is it.

Had also received a license for H200s.

Like New Matrix, Magic Infra appears to have been approved not as an ultimate

buyer of chips, but as a company that would assemble them into AI servers for another customer.

So you're seeing a repeated pattern and trend here where you have these companies,

these kind of like satellite companies that sit.

Kind of not in China, but near China in the likes of Malaysia and Singapore,

who are, for all intents and purposes, good countries that are allied with the

US, of which Shenzhen Hwang was like, cool, yeah, I'm going to sell them chips

because they're completely fine.

And they obviously have a lot of demand in their respective countries.

But what no one thought to question, at least intensely, was,

are they just leasing that compute to their friends over the fence to China?

The other thing I can't get my head around is on the US side,

we have regulators, we have committees that are meant to survey and catch these

things before they actually become a thing.

And in the US or in Jensen Huang or Nvidia's case, that is the commerce department.

And if you remember, I mentioned earlier, they've sort of been aware of this

since around, I want to say, May or April of this year. So they've been investigating

Megaspeed, they've been investigating Alice Wong.

Presumably, they already knew that Jensen was in a romantic relationship.

I guess what they didn't figure out...

Until more recently, is that she actually is a Chinese spy. But for what it's

worth, the commerce department knew about Megaspeed's potential implications,

and yet they still allowed NVIDIA to sell chips to them.

And they probably had the idea of, hmm, maybe if it's Megaspeed,

there's probably other companies.

So they probably investigated a bunch of these other companies,

but they still didn't do anything to put a stop to it. So I'm also curious about

the commerce department's ability to spot these things and stop them before

they actually become a I think there needs to be kind of like a rehaul of policies

or framework of reviewing these types of things.

And the hilarious part is right now, if you go onto the NVIDIA website,

Megaspeed and a bunch of these other companies are still listed as official

cloud partners. So technically, I guess they could still buy GPUs.

And it's worth emphasizing again that these rumors were circulating months ago.

In fact, six months ago, there was this famous tweet thread I remember reading,

I think it was Calpa Capital or something like that, which took a short thesis

on NVIDIA. And one of the main points at the time was that they thought he was

getting too close to an executive at this company called Megaspeed.

Turns out that they were right. And NVIDIA stock is down, I think,

like five to 10% at the time of recording.

Now to round this up, I want to step away from all the actual gossip and headlines

and talk about what the wider implications for all of this and patterns that

I've noticed on today's episode brought to you by Qualcomm.

The first is Jensen Huang's repeated and often intense defense of China and selling chips to them.

He has appeared on, at this point, countless of podcasts and stages and conferences,

basically arguing that Nvidia needs to be able to sell chips to China.

Now, from a business perspective, China accounts for a pretty decent and large

chunk of Nvidia's market share, market cap.

The ability to sell chips to them is non-trivial.

And so his argument there is not only, hey, I can make a lot of profit,

but it's also there's a strategic maneuver towards selling China chips and keeping them at number two.

You see, his entire argument here is we're not selling them the latest chips.

The latest chips, the brand new best chips that can train the best AI models should be kept in the US.

But we can sell them generations of chips that were like from three generations

ago and still keep them hooked on the NVIDIA infrastructure.

So a critic might then say, well, why are we selling them any chips at all?

Why are we giving them the leg up? And he goes, if we can keep China dependent

on NVIDIA's ecosystem, be it older chips, that means that they're not going

out there and building their own.

Separate, independent AI infrastructure that could be built by Chinese companies

that could end up becoming a problem over the long term to the US.

Now, imagine this case where China was shut off from buying U.S. chips at all.

And so they built their own infrastructure, data centers, their own TSMC, as it were.

And so they were able to generate their own chips from scratch.

Well, then China also has bountifuls more of energy, electricity and power generation,

which the U.S. is lacking right now.

They have insane research talent, something like 50% of the world's top AI researchers

are based in China or come out of Chinese universities.

And they have the space, the land, the ability. They don't have regulations

pushing against data centers.

They could, for all intents and purposes, steamroll the US over the long term.

So Jensen Huang's entire maneuver here is to sell them older generations,

keep them hooked on the NVIDIA ecosystem, and always know that we can always

keep them at bay, that they will never have the best things,

and America would therefore stay ahead.

And in fact, other prominent investors like Gavin Baker has backed up this theory

and said this is a good way to kind of keep the adversaries at bay.

Now, obviously, the counter argument to that is Jensen was kind of being influenced

either intentionally or unintentionally by this woman, Alice Wong,

and he was kind of going along with it

to fight for the ability to lobby the US government and say,

hey, we need to be able to sell more chips to China.

Now, maybe he was arguing this from a business perspective, which I believe

was actually the authentic case or, you know, the worst case.

Or, in fact, the worst case scenario might be that he was acting in partnership

with Alice Wong, knowing fully well what he was doing.

And I remember so clearly, there was this clip on an episode he had with an

interview with Duakesh, where Duakesh said like, hey, what's the reason for

selling these chips continually to China? Why are we empowering an adversary?

And Jensen's response at the time was, do you know that China makes the majority

of chips? The number of chips that China makes is actually a meaningful portion

of the entire chip market.

And that sounds reasonable, right? It sounds like, oh, you know,

like NVIDIA isn't actually selling them that many chips, but you should never.

Measure the AI competency of GPUs by the number of chips.

You should look at the amount of compute that the chips collectively make.

If you look at it in that way, NVIDIA's chip sales to.

China actually severely outweigh the total amount of compute that Chinese chips

make. Chinese chips are, for all intents and purposes, not great at all.

Chinese chips, at best, do not create even a fracture of the amount that a few

NVIDIA chips actually make. They're the creme de la creme. So you want NVIDIA

chips. That's why all these labs are doing this.

And if you step away from this, there are other tactics that China has been

employing to acquire NVIDIA chips or to acquire AI intelligence that the US has held for so long.

One obvious one is the distillation attacks that are still repeated today on

Frontier AI labs. Most recently, we've seen accusations to DeepSeek and Moonshot

Labs who created Kimi K3.7 or whatever.

Their recent model is flagship and amazing.

They've been accused of distillation attacking OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra in order

to build a competent model.

Anthropic has also faced these attacks. They've been able to defend against this.

And then you've got the likes of Google facing the same attacks as well.

So my point is the lengths that China will go to, the lengths that

nation states will go to to compete with AI specifically is unheard of and something

that we need to be careful about because it's a state of national security.

So the battle and war between China and the US when it comes to AI happens on

four fronts, right? First, we have the chips, which is what the whole point

of this episode and story is today.

The second comes around power and power generation. On the US side of things,

you've seen the recent elections, which is arguably going to slow that down

a lot, which is arguably, from a business side of things, bad for America.

On Chinese side, they have a heck ton of power and no regulations to kind of

stop them from standing up data centers and compute.

Thirdly, you have people. So China's AI research talent is quite high,

but they're also poaching a lot of talent from the US.

And the fourth point is around models. Now, whilst China can't actively go in

and steal model weights, although we've seen attempts of this most recently from

OpenAI at having a spy internally that was stealing their weights or spying

and listening to conversations, China can still commit distillation attacks.

And there's many multiple complex ways that they're able to do this, where they spin up.

Warehouses and teams in foreign countries that are neighboring to China,

and they commit attacks from many different places at the same time in order

to be able to distill these frontier models from the US and build their own.

And I'm not making light of this, what is at stake here is potentially the most

important technology of our time, getting into the hands of a country,

nation, or region that we don't.

And that's not to say that China and Southeast Asia shouldn't have access or

shouldn't have the competency to be able to build AI.

They should obviously be able to do it ethically. Now, on this note,

Trump actually has a trip scheduled to visit President Xi Jinping of China in Shenzhen.

And presumably, this is going to be the top of the docket. Now,

up until now, Jensen Huang was on the list of guests and people that were going

to be accompanying him and his entourage. Whether that happens now,

I have no idea. But if I had to guess, I would say that it will happen and all

of this will blow over. And that's.

Kind of like the wider point here, if I wanted to be framework-oriented around

this, you look at the likes of Amazon, Google, Microsoft, who all had CEOs which

went through similar affair ordeals.

Granted, it wasn't with an actual spy for a foreign adversary.

And the share stock price, et cetera, of these companies have done relatively

well since then. So the argument there isn't that having an affair obviously

results in a much better stock price, it's more so that this kind of stuff tends to blow over.

The worst implication, and where this is distinct, is if the company or CEO

himself, Jensen Huang, had actually intentionally leaked secrets.

That's going to be a major, or that's going to have a major implication on one

of the most important companies of our time today, one of the most valuable

companies, if not the most valuable company in the world.

And I also think about the energy that it's going to drain from Jensen Huang

or the distraction that it's going to pose to Jensen Huang when he should be

focused and dialed on building out NVIDIA at this very crucial moment in our history.

So yeah, that is basically the story. I'm filming this at home because I needed

to get some kind of an episode out soon about this.

It happened all over the weekend and kind of like, I've been kind of trying

to keep up to date with it. But yeah, I'm posting five times a week and I'll

see you on the next one. Thank you for listening to today's episode brought to you by Qualcomm.