Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang may have been the target of a surveillance operation run through a woman U.S. intelligence agencies suspect is a Chinese intelligence asset, according to a report. The suspect, identified as Alice Huang or Huang Le, was listed as managing director of Megaspeed, a Singaporean AI firm that serves as an Nvidia cloud partner. Megaspeed builds data centers and rents out computing capacity to Chinese companies including Alibaba.
The investigation into Megaspeed began after the U.S. Commerce Department visited the firm's Malaysia data center and found Nvidia equipment it had ordered still packed in boxes. That finding raised suspicion that the machines had either just been shipped in or were about to be shipped out rather than installed at the site. It remains unclear what led U.S. intelligence agencies to investigate Ms. Huang. Megaspeed was accused of helping smuggle $2 billion worth of Nvidia chips last year.
Ms. Huang has been seen in public with the Nvidia chief on multiple occasions. She was photographed sitting beside Jensen Huang alongside other executives at an informal event around Computex 2024, in a LinkedIn post by NetThunder that identified her as Megaspeed Chairwoman Alice Wong. About a year later, around the same time as Computex 2025, she was again seen with Jensen Huang leaving a restaurant in Taipei alongside other business associates.
An Nvidia spokesperson told Tom's Hardware that Megaspeed has been no different than many other regional cloud customers and that Jensen's interactions with Ms. Huang are not unusual or unexpected. The spokesperson said meetings with customers are part of a CEO's job and that Jensen talks with thousands of customer executives every year. The spokesperson added that regional cloud customers receive ordinary business information, not sensitive Nvidia trade secrets, and zero information relevant to national security. The possibility that Chinese intelligence is targeting a senior figure close to President Trump is reportedly troubling some U.S. officials.
The Chinese embassy in Washington denied the allegations, describing them as groundless smears and slanders against China. The report also noted that it would make sense for Beijing to keep tabs on senior executives of top American firms that arguably single-handedly fueled the AI boom, and that Jensen Huang's status as a celebrity CEO means he is surrounded by all kinds of people from both the U.S. and China.
Sources cited in the report claimed Mr. Huang has not yet been given a defensive briefing, a warning that U.S. counterintelligence agencies sometimes give to American citizens targeted by foreign intelligence services, even though surveillance against Alice Huang continues. The report speculates that withholding the briefing may be intended to avoid alerting Alice Huang that she was being investigated.
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