--- title: Questions Over Jensen Huang and a Suspected Chinese Spy Now Run from Nvidia's Boardroom to the White House and Wall Street description: Huang admitted an affair after reports a US memo names Megaspeed's Alice Huang as a Chinese intelligence recruit. Trump was briefed a year ago, the NYT says. author: Darie Nani (Editor-in-Chief) date: 2026-11-09T14:57:28.107Z updated: 2026-11-09T14:57:28.130Z canonical: https://www.sovereignmagazine.com/article/nvidia-jensen-huang-investigation image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/jensen-huang-nvidia-official.webp categories: Artificial Intelligence content_type: News region: United States publication: Sovereign Magazine about: - type: Organization name: Nvidia --- Jensen Huang told Nvidia staff on Sunday that he had been unfaithful to his wife, and the company's board opened an independent investigation into reports that its founder and chief executive was the target of a foreign intelligence effort. The woman at the center of those reports is Alice Huang, an executive at Megaspeed, a company based in Singapore. The New York Times reported on 6 November that a classified US memo says she was recruited by China's Ministry of State Security, and the Financial Times reported that the memo describes a romantic relationship between her and Huang. Alice Huang and Jensen Huang are not related, and she is not named in his memo to staff. On Monday Guo Jiakun, a spokesman for China's foreign ministry, called the allegation groundless and a smear against China. According to the Times, Megaspeed's Malaysian sister company bought at least $4.8 billion of AI equipment containing Nvidia chips between June 2024 and February 2026, a Commerce Department investigation into Megaspeed has been handed to the Justice Department, and President Donald Trump was briefed on the intelligence roughly a year ago and chose not to act. Nvidia shares opened at $173.04 on Monday, about 7% below Friday's close of $186.64, and fell as low as $170.24 in early trading. ## Independent Directors and Outside Counsel Will Oversee Nvidia's Investigation of Huang "I owe my family and all of you an apology," Huang wrote in his memo. "I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry." On the national security concerns, he wrote that he supported the board's investigation and would "cooperate fully", adding, "I love our country and our company, and I am committed to protecting NVIDIA and supporting America's national security." He asked staff to give his family privacy. [Nvidia's board said](https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/statement-from-nvidia-board-of-directors) 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," the board said. It added that Huang "fully supports the review" and that the board "has confidence in Jensen and his leadership team". John Rizzo, an Nvidia spokesman, said, "Today's news will not slow NVIDIA. Jensen is committed to continuing to lead NVIDIA as CEO without interruption." Before Sunday, Nvidia had said, "Meetings with customers are part of a CEO's job," and described them as "not unusual". The two were seen together on a couple of occasions after industry events in Taiwan. Nvidia's code of conduct requires employees, officers and directors to avoid any activity that conflicts with, "or has the appearance of conflicting with," the company's interests. Whether Huang told the board about the relationship has not been made public, and it is a question for the independent directors' investigation. ## Megaspeed's Malaysian Sister Company Bought $4.8 Billion of Equipment Containing Nvidia Chips Megaspeed was created in 2023, when 7Road, a Chinese gaming and cloud company, split off its overseas operation. 7Road has state-backed investors, and Senator Tom Cotton has called it "Chinese government-owned". On 13 October 2025 Cotton wrote to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick asking the department to "investigate Megaspeed, including suspicious ownership, affiliations, or ties" to American chip companies. Commerce Department officials who visited Megaspeed's data center in Malaysia in late 2024 found Nvidia equipment still in its boxes. The department began investigating that year, and this year the case was handed to the Justice Department. Megaspeed says the Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security, Malaysia's trade ministry and Nvidia had each inspected it and found "no evidence of any violations concerning the illicit transfer of chips or any illegal activities". Megaspeed's current leadership has said it takes the allegations seriously, has hired outside counsel for an internal investigation and will cooperate with the US government, and Alice Huang has become less active at the company. Nvidia has said the diversion allegations were "investigated and debunked last year" and that its compliance team found Megaspeed "wholly owned and operated by a company based and headquartered outside China, with no China shareholders". No one has been charged, and there has been no public finding that any chips were diverted. ## Trump Was Briefed a Year Ago and Chose Not to Act, According to the Times Alice Huang was under US electronic surveillance, and Trump was briefed roughly a year ago, the Times reported on 29 October. He chose not to act because he was wary of disrupting Nvidia's chip sales and straining trade relations with China. Officials did not then believe Huang knew of her role, though some senior officials now doubt he was unaware. Rizzo said, "We trust that if we were the target of a genuine threat, the U.S. government would have notified us." Huang has not received a defensive briefing, in which US officials warn someone that a foreign intelligence service is targeting them, because that could have tipped her off. Secretary of State Marco Rubio oversaw the creation of the classified memo, which circulated shortly before Trump flew to Beijing in May, the Times and the Financial Times have reported. Asked about it on Sunday on his way to the G7 in Paris, Rubio said, "I just can't comment because of the nature of it... an internal corporate matter." "I have not spoken to him about it," Trump said on Sunday. Speaking to reporters in West Palm Beach, he was asked whether Huang would join his trip to Asia this month, which includes the APEC meetings in Shenzhen on 18 and 19 November. "I'd certainly take him. I haven't heard he's done anything wrong. He dealt with somebody, but you know, so does everybody else," he said. Asked about the investigation, he called Huang "an honorable guy" who "probably has an excuse for it", and asked whether Huang should stay on as chief executive, he said, "I think so, oh yeah, sure." ## Commerce Approved Chinese H200 Buyers During Trump's Beijing Summit Trump said on 8 December 2025 that Nvidia could sell its H200 chip to "approved customers in China", with 25% going to the US. The Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security set the terms on 13 January, moving to case-by-case review with conditions that include customer screening and independent testing by a US third party. Under a presidential proclamation issued the next day, the chips are subject to a 25% tariff when they enter the US before going on to China. Huang was initially left off Trump's delegation to China in May and added at the last minute, joining Air Force One in Alaska. During the summit, Commerce approved about 10 Chinese companies to buy H200s, including Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance and JD.com, with up to 75,000 chips per customer, Reuters reported at the time. Those approvals came after the memo warning senior officials about Alice Huang and her relationship with Nvidia's chief executive had circulated. In total, Commerce has cleared about two dozen Chinese companies to buy or handle H200s, the Times reported on Saturday. One of them, New Matrix, a 17-month-old Beijing company licensed to assemble H200s into servers, lists an address in an empty building, and its two main owners are tied to companies connected to Wise Road, a private equity firm on the US Entity List since 2024. Another, the newly created Maginfra, occupied "a small locked room with a few chairs and empty desks" when reporters visited in September, and analysts believe it is an offshoot of Inspur, whose parent company is blacklisted. Both were cleared under rules that require customer screening. Senator John Cornyn called the report "outrageous". Nvidia's quarterly filing for the period to 26 July says US licenses allowed "small amounts" of H200 to specific China-based customers, "but such sales were [restricted by the PRC government](https://www.sovereignmagazine.com/article/china-bans-nvidia-chips-after-decade-of-us-tech-restrictions)". The company took a $0.4 billion charge on the H200 in the first half of its fiscal year. [About 600,000 of the chips are now held up in Hong Kong](https://www.sovereignmagazine.com/article/nvidia-h200-chips-hong-kong-china) while Beijing withholds approval for large imports. ## House Chairs Want Huang to Brief Them on 18 November, and Democrats Take Over Congress in January Three Republican committee chairs, Brian Mast of Foreign Affairs, John Moolenaar of the China Select Committee and Rick Crawford of Intelligence, wrote to Huang on 4 November asking him to a joint closed-door briefing on 18 November and requesting a reply by 11 November. [In announcing the letter](https://foreignaffairs.house.gov/news/press-releases/chairmen-mast-moolenaar-and-crawford-request-jensen-huang-brief-congress-on-link-to-chinese-intelligence-asset), the chairs described Alice Huang as "a publicly reported" Chinese intelligence asset. They have asked Huang to attend and have not issued a subpoena. > "Congress will investigate and get answers." > — Senator Chris Coons Senator Chris Coons, a Democrat who is due to chair the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from January, made that pledge on 7 November, four days after Republicans lost control of both the House and the Senate in the midterms. Democrats take over both chambers in January. Representative Seth Magaziner has called for Lutnick, whose department investigated Megaspeed and approved the H200 buyers, to testify alongside Huang. Trump says AI risk is already handled by the Justice Department. In a 60 Minutes interview with Ross Douthat, taped at the White House on Friday and aired on Sunday, he was asked why he was not worried by the fears of people building AI, some of whom talk of a 10% chance that it kills humanity. "I think the risk can be managed. And it's managed, you know who? By who? The DOJ," he said. He described a case in which "somebody was reported to us to be doing something bad with AI", adding, "We called them very strongly and said, 'Get ready to go to jail.'" Asked who the person was, or which company, he said, "I can't tell you." Asked whether it was a leader of a major AI company, he said, "One of the big ones. Yeah." When Douthat asked whether he would work with Democrats on AI safety rules, Trump said, "I don't mind guardrails. But I don't wanna put us in a deep second position." Trump named neither the person nor the company, and no one has identified them. The White House and the Justice Department have not commented. ## Nvidia Has No Clear Successor to Huang, Who Has Run It Since 1993 Huang has run Nvidia since founding it in 1993, and the company has no clear successor. "If we genuinely thought he was going to step down, it would be an absolute bloodbath," one analyst told Reuters. Dan Ives of Wedbush called talk of replacing Huang "comedy" and the episode a "black eye moment". Jeffrey Sonnenfeld of Yale put Huang's odds of staying at "about a 50-50". Monday's fall came four days after [Nvidia lost 9.3% and the S&P 500 4.4%](https://www.sovereignmagazine.com/article/anthropic-ipo-data-centers-midterms) on 5 November, in a selloff that followed a midterm vote in which voters turned against data centers. Nvidia makes up about 8% of the S&P 500 by weight, so any fall in its shares lowers the value of every fund that tracks the index. ## Nvidia Has Guaranteed Up to $105 Billion for OpenAI's Ohio Data Center Campus In August Nvidia guaranteed obligations owed to SB Energy for OpenAI's PORTS campus in Pike County, Ohio, a site of about 4.25 gigawatts leased to an OpenAI affiliate for 20 years, up to a cap of $105 billion. Its latest quarterly filing lists $366 billion of commitments, of which $279 billion is for supply and capacity, up from $119 billion the quarter before, plus separate guarantees of up to $3.5 billion on land, power and buildings for AI cloud providers. In January Nvidia also bought $2 billion of CoreWeave stock at $87.20 a share. Some investors describe arrangements in which Nvidia invests in or guarantees customers that buy its chips as [circular financing](https://www.sovereignmagazine.com/article/ai-bubble-warning-billionaire-investors-dump-nvidia-hours-before-make-or-break-earnings), a label Huang disputes. Investors and analysts are weighing what losing Huang would mean for a company carrying those commitments, in a market that had already fallen before Sunday. Against that, most of the money spent on AI data centers comes from Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta, which pay for it from their own cash. Shipments of the H200, the chip it is licensed to sell to approved customers in China, were less than 1% of data center revenue in the quarter to 26 July. Investors cannot yet tell whether this stays a question about Huang's conduct and Nvidia's governance or becomes a question about the quality of Nvidia's demand, which would happen if Megaspeed's purchases were shown to have reached China. Huang's reply to the House chairs is due on Wednesday, and Nvidia reports third-quarter results on 17 November, the day before the briefing he has been asked to attend. ## FAQ **Q: Who is Alice Huang?** Alice Huang is an executive at Megaspeed, a company based in Singapore, and she is not related to Jensen Huang. The New York Times reported that a classified US memo says she was recruited by China's Ministry of State Security and describes her relationship with Huang. She was seen with him after industry events in Taiwan. China's foreign ministry calls the allegation groundless. She has become less active at Megaspeed, whose leadership has hired outside counsel for an internal investigation. **Q: Who is Megaspeed?** Megaspeed is a Singapore-based company created in 2023, when the Chinese gaming and cloud company 7Road split off its overseas operation. Its Malaysian sister company bought at least $4.8 billion of AI equipment containing Nvidia chips between June 2024 and February 2026, and a Commerce Department investigation that began in late 2024 is now with the Justice Department. Megaspeed says inspections by US and Malaysian officials and by Nvidia found no evidence of illicit chip transfers, and Nvidia has said its compliance team found the company has no Chinese shareholders. No one has been charged. **Q: Is Nvidia selling chips to China now?** Nvidia can sell its H200 to Chinese buyers the US has approved, under a policy Trump announced in December 2025 with 25% going to the US, and Commerce has cleared about two dozen Chinese companies to buy or handle the chip. Beijing has restricted those purchases. Nvidia's filing for the quarter to 26 July put H200 shipments at less than 1% of its data center revenue.