China’s Top Spy Agency Recruited Woman Who Targeted Jensen Huang

Lawmakers want him to appear behind closed doors and explain a series of meetings with Alice Huang – a Chinese businesswoman who, according to U.S. intelligence, was directly handling for the Ministry of State Security (MSS).

Alice Huang, who runs Singapore‑based cloud operator Megaspeed International, is not a relative of the Nvidia founder despite sharing a surname. U.S. officials who have monitored her electronic communications for more than a year say she was recruited by the MSS to extract technical insight from Jensen Huang and to gauge whether Nvidia might be persuaded to ship its most advanced GPUs to China. People who have met her describe a fluent English speaker who moves easily among industry executives, from the heads of Gigabyte to senior Nvidia engineers, and who was photographed together with Jensen at a bar in Taipei in 2024.

The timing of Megaspeed’s multibillion‑dollar purchase of Nvidia’s latest AI chips coincides with that 2024 meeting. According to the Times report, the company began buying “advanced AI chips worth billions of dollars” out of the blue, then deployed them in data centres it built across Southeast Asia. Those facilities lease compute power to Alibaba, giving China a back‑door channel to run Nvidia GPUs that the United States has barred from direct export. The corporate web that supports Megaspeed also includes investors from Shanghai and Zhejiang who have long ties to local officials, and a minority stake in a cybersecurity unit of China Electronics Technology Group – a key military‑technology conglomerate.

The recruitment of a senior Megaspeed executive represents a textbook case of the MSS blending human assets with commercial outreach to sidestep export controls.

Nonetheless, senior U.S. officials say they briefed President Donald Trump on the surveillance a year ago, yet the president “took no action,” a decision analysts tie to concerns about disrupting Nvidia’s booming sales and broader trade tensions.

What remains unclear is whether Jensen Huang ever knew Alice Huang was suspected of espionage, and whether Nvidia received any formal warning from U.S. agencies before the congressional inquiry.