Nvidia Pushes Back on Report That a Suspected Chinese Asset Gained Access to Jensen Huang

NVDA pushed back on Thursday against a New York Times report that U.S. intelligence agencies surveilled a person close to chief executive Jensen Huang because they believed she could be a Chinese intelligence asset. According to the report, U.S. officials concluded that Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le, a former executive in a leadership role at Singapore-based cloud company Megaspeed, gained access to the Nvidia CEO and met him multiple times. Megaspeed buys Nvidia chips to build data centers and rents out the computing power, and it had already drawn scrutiny from U.S. agencies over possible evasion of export controls on advanced AI chips.

Nvidia said Megaspeed is one of its regional cloud customers, that Huang's interactions with its officials are not unusual because he speaks with thousands of customers a year, and that customers do not get access to Nvidia trade secrets or national security information. The company said the chip-diversion allegations against Megaspeed "were thoroughly investigated and debunked last year," and that it is confident the U.S. government would tell it if any person were a threat to American industry. The Times reported that President Donald Trump was briefed about a year ago but took no action, as officials did not believe Huang knew she was gathering intelligence; the Chinese government rejected the allegations as "groundless smears and slanders".

The episode lands on Nvidia's most sensitive policy front. The company has lobbied for permission to sell some chips into China; in January the Commerce Department allowed H200 exports on a case-by-case basis in exchange for a 25% fee paid to the U.S. government, though Chinese regulators then blocked the imports, and Nvidia previously wrote off about $4.5 billion in China-tuned chips. Investors largely looked through the report: Nvidia shares ended Thursday down about 0.8%, per SentiSense market data.

What to watch: any response from the White House or congressional China hawks, further disclosures from U.S. agencies about Megaspeed, and whether the report affects Nvidia's standing in export-license discussions for China-bound chips.