On Sunday night, the man who runs the most valuable company in the world sent a letter to his employees admitting he had cheated on his wife. According to American intelligence, the other woman was working for China's spy service.
This episode covers three things. Who the woman is and how the affair came out. The Singapore company she helped run and the billions of dollars in Nvidia chips it bought. And what Washington knew, when it knew it, and what it did about it.
The man is Jensen Huang. He runs Nvidia. The company's chips are inside most of the computers that train and run artificial intelligence. When people talk about an AI race between America and China, Nvidia's chips are what both countries are racing to get.
Huang was born in Taipei, Taiwan, in February of nineteen sixty three. When he was nine, his family sent him and his older brother to America. They first lived with an uncle in Tacoma, Washington. Their aunt and uncle then enrolled the two boys at the Oneida Baptist Institute in Kentucky, believing it was a fine boarding school. It was actually a religious reform academy. His parents sold nearly everything they owned to pay the tuition.
His parents later settled in Beaverton, Oregon. Huang earned an electrical engineering degree from Oregon State University in nineteen eighty four and married his wife, Lori, the next year. He later earned a master's degree from Stanford, going to class at night while he worked. He and Lori have two grown children, Spencer and Madison. Both work at Nvidia.
In nineteen ninety three, Huang and two other engineers, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, met at a Denny's in East San Jose and started the company. Huang was thirty. For years Nvidia was known for graphics cards that gamers put in their computers. Then researchers found those same chips were very good at the kind of math artificial intelligence runs on, and the company took off.
In October of twenty twenty five, Nvidia became the first public company in history worth more than five trillion dollars. In August of this year it reported a quarterly profit of fifty nine point six nine billion dollars. Forbes puts Huang's own fortune at more than two hundred billion dollars, the seventh largest in the world.
Taiwan is central to the business. Nvidia designs its chips in California, but the most advanced ones are manufactured in Taiwan by TSMC, the world's largest contract chipmaker. Huang is a celebrity there, and he makes regular trips to Taipei for meetings with suppliers and for the island's big technology shows. Beijing claims Taiwan as its own territory.
The woman is Alice Huang. She also goes by Huang Le. The two are not related. Huang is one of the most common family names in China and Taiwan. She is a Chinese citizen, and before going into business she worked as a television reporter in China. Senator Tom Cotton's office describes her as a former Chinese state media reporter.
In March of twenty twenty three she became managing director of a Singapore company called Megaspeed International. Megaspeed runs data centers, the warehouses full of computers that power artificial intelligence. That November, Megaspeed joined an Nvidia partner program.
Early in twenty twenty four, according to people familiar with the matter, she met Jensen Huang at an Nvidia event in California. Nobody has said publicly when the relationship began. In June of twenty twenty four the two were photographed together around Computex, the big computer trade show in Taipei. One photo shows her sitting beside him at a party. On May twenty second of twenty twenty five, they were at a group dinner in Taipei, and video from that night shows affectionate contact between them.
American intelligence was already watching her by then. Late in twenty twenty four, U.S. agencies put Alice Huang under electronic surveillance. When American spy agencies listen to a foreigner, the names of any Americans on the other end are hidden in the reports. Officials have to ask for a name to be revealed, a step called unmasking. In this case, the American in contact with Alice Huang turned out to be Jensen Huang. Officials came to believe the two were in a romantic relationship.
In the spring of this year, a classified memo went around among senior officials in Washington. It said China's Ministry of State Security had recruited Alice Huang to target Jensen Huang. Reports say Secretary of State Marco Rubio oversaw the writing of that memo.
According to the Times, officials worried about two things she could learn from him. One was Nvidia's product plans, meaning which chips are coming and when. The other was where Huang stood in his private lobbying on how much the United States should let Nvidia sell to China. The Times later reported that the memo described her goal as collecting information on artificial intelligence chips and possibly influencing Nvidia itself.
The Ministry of State Security is China's main spy agency. It does the kind of work the CIA does overseas and the FBI does at home, under one roof. China's National Intelligence Law, passed in twenty seventeen, requires every Chinese citizen and organization to support and cooperate with state intelligence work. When that ministry asks a Chinese citizen for help, the law does not give her the option of saying no.
The ministry goes after American companies, not just governments. In twenty eighteen, one of its officers, Yanjun Xu, flew to Belgium to meet an engineer from GE Aviation in Cincinnati. Xu had spent years using fake names, front companies and Chinese universities to lure engineers from the jet engine business to China with offers to give paid presentations. While they were out at dinner, his people copied the files on their laptops back at the hotel. The GE engineer he flew to meet was working with the FBI. Belgium arrested Xu and sent him to the United States, the first Chinese intelligence officer ever extradited here to stand trial. A jury convicted him in twenty twenty one, and he was sentenced to twenty years in prison. Former FBI Director Christopher Wray said in twenty twenty two that the bureau was opening a new counterintelligence case tied to China about every twelve hours.
The New York Times broke the story on October twenty ninth. It reported that U.S. intelligence had identified Alice Huang as passing information directly to Beijing, and that she had a close relationship with the head of Nvidia. The next day Huang told Bloomberg his dealings with her were business and, in his words, completely normal. An Nvidia spokesman, John Rizzo, said Huang's dealings with her were not unusual or unexpected. The company said meeting with customers is part of a chief executive's job and that customers get ordinary business information, not trade secrets.
The White House, the CIA and the National Security Agency all declined to comment. China's embassy in Washington called the claims groundless smears and slanders. Senator Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat, went on X the same day and called on Nvidia and Huang to answer questions in front of Congress. Nvidia stock closed that day at two hundred thirteen dollars and sixty six cents.
Officials who first briefed the President did not believe Huang knew what she was doing. The Times reported that some senior officials in the administration now doubt he could have been unaware.
Ten days later the story changed. On Sunday, November eighth, Huang sent his letter to Nvidia's employees. He wrote that he had been unfaithful to his wife. He apologized to his family and his colleagues and said he took full responsibility. He wrote that leading Nvidia is the privilege of his life and that he had fallen short of what he owed the people who work there. He did not name the woman. He wrote that he loves his country and his company and would cooperate fully.
That same night, Nvidia's board opened an investigation run by its independent directors and outside lawyers. The question in front of them is whether Huang was the target of what the board called a foreign intelligence effort. The board said it has no reason to believe that national security or company secrets were compromised. Huang stays on as chief executive while the review runs, and the board said it has confidence in his leadership. A company spokesman said the news will not slow Nvidia.
Wall Street took it harder. When the market opened Monday, Nvidia stock fell as much as eight percent. Within minutes it was down fourteen dollars and twenty seven cents a share, at one hundred seventy two dollars and thirty seven cents, one month after hitting an all time high. From the close on the day the Times story ran, that is a loss of about one fifth of the company's value in less than two weeks, during a stretch when technology stocks were falling across the board after the election. Dan Ives, a technology analyst who has long been bullish on the company, wrote that there is a small chance Huang is removed or steps down, and called him not replaceable.
Corporate boards have pushed out chief executives over relationships before. Intel's Brian Krzanich resigned in twenty eighteen after the board learned of a past consensual relationship with an employee, which broke company policy. McDonald's fired Steve Easterbrook in twenty nineteen over a consensual relationship with an employee. Both of those cases involved people inside the company. Alice Huang worked for a customer.
Beijing answered on Monday through its Foreign Ministry. Spokesman Guo Jiakun called the spy allegation purely unsubstantiated and said it was aimed at smearing China.
American intelligence cared who Alice Huang was close to because of the company she helped run.
Megaspeed was spun off from a Chinese cloud company called Seven Road. In October of twenty twenty five, Senator Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas, wrote to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and said Seven Road is owned by the Chinese government. The company Alice Huang ran was itself once named Seven Road International.
On paper, Megaspeed is a Singapore company. Cotton's letter, citing published reporting, described the rest. Its offices in Singapore and Malaysia were nearly empty. Most of its executives live in China. Its chief executive, James Tan, is a Singapore citizen who lives in Shanghai. Some of its chip orders were routed through a subsidiary of Inspur, a Chinese computer maker under American sanctions. The letter also said the chip orders started flowing to Megaspeed after an American chip company met with a former Chinese state media reporter who held executive roles at Megaspeed. The letter did not name her.
Singapore and Malaysia matter for a reason. Since October of twenty twenty two, the United States has banned the sale of Nvidia's most powerful artificial intelligence chips to China. Those rules do not ban sales to Singapore or Malaysia. Investigators have suspected for years that companies in Southeast Asia buy the chips legally and then pass them, or the computing power they produce, to customers inside China.
The Commerce Department gave its reasons when it wrote the first ban in twenty twenty two. It said advanced computing chips were being used for Chinese military modernization, for the design of weapons of mass destruction, and for mass surveillance. In October of twenty twenty three, the rules were tightened again to cover the A eight hundred and H eight hundred, two chips Nvidia had designed specifically to stay under the first set of limits and keep selling in China.
Megaspeed bought a lot of them. According to the New York Times, a Megaspeed sister company in Malaysia bought at least four point eight billion dollars' worth of equipment containing Nvidia chips between June of twenty twenty four and February of this year. Cotton's letter said sales to Megaspeed made up almost two percent of one American chipmaker's worldwide data center sales in a single year. About a year after the Taipei party photo, Alice Huang arranged roughly two billion dollars in chip purchases from Nvidia. Sources told the Times those chips were headed to data centers in Malaysia and Indonesia that appear to serve Chinese customers.
Late in twenty twenty four, a Commerce Department official visited a Megaspeed data center in Malaysia. The Nvidia chips there were still in their boxes. They had not been installed in server racks. A data center that is actually using chips puts them to work. Chips left sitting in boxes look like inventory waiting to go somewhere else. The Commerce Department opened an investigation into whether Megaspeed was helping restricted American technology reach China.
Company records show Alice Huang stepped down as a Megaspeed director in November of twenty twenty three. She kept acting as one of the company's leaders anyway, and she was still introducing herself as Megaspeed's chief executive as late as August of twenty twenty five.
That same August, Nvidia's top lawyer, general counsel Tim Teter, contacted the Commerce investigators. That worried some of them, because Nvidia itself had not been ruled out as a subject of the case. Commerce was told to proceed strictly by the book. The Justice Department then paused the Commerce work and took over a criminal inquiry into Megaspeed.
According to Cotton's letter, Megaspeed stopped ordering from Nvidia after officials in Malaysia and Singapore cracked down on chip smuggling in the summer of twenty twenty five. On July fourteenth of that year, Malaysia began requiring a government permit for anyone exporting or moving American artificial intelligence chips through the country. Even so, the Times reported that businesses linked to Alice Huang were still buying Nvidia chips into this year, after American officials had already become concerned about her.
Megaspeed is not the only route American prosecutors have looked at. In August of twenty twenty five, the Justice Department charged two Chinese nationals, both twenty eight, who ran a California company called ALX Solutions. Prosecutors said they shipped Nvidia chips to freight companies in Singapore and Malaysia for nearly three years, while the money came in from Hong Kong and China, including one million dollars from a company in China. In December, prosecutors announced a case they called Operation Gatekeeper. A Texas man pleaded guilty to moving at least one hundred sixty million dollars in Nvidia chips toward China. His workers peeled off the Nvidia labels, stuck on a made up brand name, and listed the chips on shipping papers as computer parts. His company took in more than fifty million dollars in wire transfers from China. The Financial Times reported in July of twenty twenty five that more than one billion dollars' worth of restricted Nvidia chips had reached China since the start of that year.
Singapore had its own case by then. In February of twenty twenty five, Singapore charged three men, two Singaporeans and a Chinese national, with fraud tied to computer servers that may have contained Nvidia chips. The servers had been sold through Singapore and moved to Malaysia, and officials said they were looking at whether the hardware ended up in China.
The reason Washington watches this so closely became clear a month before that. In January of twenty twenty five, a Chinese company called DeepSeek released an artificial intelligence model that matched the best American ones, and it said the model cost a small fraction of what American companies spend. Nvidia lost close to six hundred billion dollars in market value in one day, the biggest single day loss for any company in American history. In April of twenty twenty five, the House committee on China asked Nvidia whether DeepSeek had gotten its advanced chips through Singapore.
Nvidia's position on Megaspeed has not changed. The company says the chip diversion allegations were thoroughly investigated and debunked last year. It calls Megaspeed an ordinary regional cloud customer, says it found no evidence of illegal diversion, and says it counted every one of its chips deployed at Megaspeed's sites. Megaspeed denies illegally moving chips and says it is cooperating with investigators. On the other side, Senator Cotton puts Megaspeed's imports of Nvidia hardware at more than four point six billion dollars, and a short seller called Culper Research, which profits when the stock falls, has alleged that restricted chips reach China through firms like Megaspeed. Nvidia disputes both. No charges have been reported against Alice Huang or Megaspeed. Megaspeed has hired outside lawyers and opened its own internal investigation. Singapore's Ministry of Home Affairs said on October thirty first that its investigation into Megaspeed is still going. It also said its officials had never raised concerns about Alice Huang and had not investigated her personally. There is also no public evidence that Alice Huang shaped any of Jensen Huang's positions on China.
For years, Jensen Huang argued in public that selling chips to China serves American interests. His case was that if Nvidia walked away, Chinese companies like Huawei would fill the gap and grow stronger. He has pointed out that about half of the world's artificial intelligence researchers are Chinese. In November of twenty twenty five he told the Financial Times that China was going to win the AI race. After the comment drew fire, he softened it and said China was nanoseconds behind America. As the Trump administration worked out its China chip policy, Huang spent more and more time in Washington. He and his wife Lori visited Mar-a-Lago while those decisions were being made, and he sits on the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
The chip he was fighting for in early twenty twenty five was the H twenty. Nvidia built it weaker on purpose so it could legally be sold to China. Chinese firms bought sixteen billion dollars' worth of them in the first three months of that year, stockpiling ahead of expected new limits. In early April of twenty twenty five, Huang attended a million dollar a plate dinner at Mar-a-Lago. Within days, two sources said the White House had put planned limits on the H twenty on hold after Nvidia promised new investment in American data centers.
The hold did not last. Later that month, the government required a license to ship the H twenty to China, and Nvidia took a five and a half billion dollar charge on chips it suddenly could not sell. In July the administration reversed course and said the sales could resume. In August, Nvidia and its rival AMD agreed to hand the federal government fifteen percent of their revenue from those China sales in exchange for export licenses. Legal critics pointed out that the Constitution bans taxes on exports.
In May of twenty twenty five, a Republican and a Democrat in the House, Bill Huizenga of Michigan and Bill Foster of Illinois, introduced the Chip Security Act, which would require high end chips sold overseas to carry features that could detect smuggling. The bill has not moved. Beijing then turned on Nvidia from its own side. On July thirty first, China's internet regulator summoned Nvidia and demanded it explain what it called backdoor safety risks in the H twenty, claiming the chips could be tracked and shut off remotely. Nvidia said its chips have no backdoors. In September of twenty twenty five, Chinese regulators told the country's biggest technology companies to stop buying Nvidia's artificial intelligence chips. That same month Huawei laid out a three year plan for its own Ascend line of artificial intelligence chips, built to replace Nvidia's inside China. In October, Huang said Nvidia's share of the Chinese market had gone from ninety five percent to zero. In the company's fiscal year that ended in January of twenty twenty five, China had brought in about seventeen billion dollars, roughly thirteen percent of Nvidia's sales.
On December eighth of twenty twenty five, the President announced on Truth Social that Nvidia could sell its more powerful H two hundred chip to Chinese customers approved by the Commerce Department, with the government taking twenty five percent of the money. He wrote that he had told Xi Jinping, and that Xi responded positively. Nvidia's top line Blackwell chips were left out of the deal. The President had considered allowing those too, then backed away. In January of this year the Commerce Department said each H two hundred request would be reviewed case by case, with checks on the customer and independent testing of the chips.
There was a broader rule fight as well. In January of twenty twenty five, in its last days, the Biden administration issued what it called the AI diffusion rule, which sorted the world's countries into tiers and capped how many advanced chips most of them could buy. Nvidia publicly opposed it. In May of twenty twenty five, the Trump administration rescinded it before it took effect.
Huang kept pressing. According to the Financial Times, he personally lobbied the President early this year to open up more H two hundred sales to China. In May, when the President flew to Beijing for his summit with Xi, Huang was not on the list of chief executives traveling with him. The President then called him, and Huang joined the group when the plane stopped in Alaska. The Financial Times reported that the classified memo on Alice Huang had gone around among a small group of senior officials shortly before that trip.
That same month, at the Milken Institute conference, Huang was saying China should not get Blackwell or the newer Rubin chips at all, and that America should have the first, the most and the best.
The President was briefed in twenty twenty five on the intelligence about Alice Huang. Jensen Huang was never given what is called a defensive briefing. That is the warning the FBI gives an American who is being targeted by a foreign spy, so the person can cut off contact. The President took no action.
There is a well known case of that warning working. Between twenty eleven and twenty fifteen, a Chinese woman named Fang Fang, also known as Christine Fang, enrolled as a student at Cal State East Bay and worked her way into California politics. She helped raise money for Democratic Congressman Eric Swalwell's twenty fourteen reelection campaign and helped place an intern in his office. Axios later reported she had sexual or romantic relationships with at least two mayors in the Midwest. When the FBI learned what she was doing in twenty fifteen, it gave Swalwell a defensive briefing. He cut ties with her, and she left the country. Swalwell was never accused of wrongdoing. When Republicans took the House in twenty twenty three, Speaker Kevin McCarthy kept Swalwell off the Intelligence Committee and pointed to the Fang Fang case as the reason.
Britain had its own case. In January of twenty twenty two, M I five, Britain's domestic security service, took the rare step of issuing a public alert about a London lawyer named Christine Lee. M I five said she was working on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party to influence Parliament. She had given hundreds of thousands of pounds to the office of Labour member of Parliament Barry Gardiner, and her son worked on his staff.
Using romance to get to a target is one of the oldest moves in spying. In the nineteen eighties, a Marine guard at the American embassy in Moscow named Clayton Lonetree was drawn in by a Soviet woman who worked at the embassy, and she turned him over to the KGB. In nineteen eighty seven he became the first Marine ever convicted of espionage.
On Sunday and Monday, the President stood by Huang. He said he had not spoken to him before the news broke, and that he hoped everything was fine. He said Huang had absolutely no idea the woman was a spy, and that Huang told him so directly. Asked when he first learned about the concerns, the President said not too long ago. Asked about the spring memo, he said it certainly did not make much of an impact on him. He called Huang an honorable man who probably has an excuse and who had done an amazing job for the country. He said the FBI was looking into the matter in terms of something else, and did not explain what that meant. He also said he would certainly take Huang with him on his trip to Asia next week. That trip includes the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, which China is hosting this year in the city of Shenzhen.
Secretary of State Rubio, leaving for a meeting of the G seven in Paris, said he could not comment on the nature of the matter or on what he called an internal corporate matter at Nvidia.
Congress is not waiting. Three House Republican committee chairmen signed a letter inviting Huang to a closed door briefing on November eighteenth. They are Brian Mast of Florida, who chairs Foreign Affairs, John Moolenaar of Michigan, who chairs the select committee on China, and Rick Crawford of Arkansas, who chairs the Intelligence Committee. They asked him to accept or offer another date by November eleventh. They want to know about his dealings with Alice Huang and how Nvidia protects itself from foreign spying. They wrote that China's access to sensitive American technology is at the center of the work all three of their committees are doing. They wrote that Congress has to determine whether American national security was put at risk. As of this recording, Huang has not said publicly whether he will attend.
The briefing date falls one day after Nvidia reports its third quarter earnings on November seventeenth. And in January, Democrats take control of the House. Dan Ives wrote that last week's blue wave will bring more scrutiny from Washington on China and chip restrictions, just as the artificial intelligence race with China heats up.
That is where it stands. A chief executive who admitted an affair with a woman American intelligence says was recruited by Beijing. A Singapore company tied to the Chinese government that bought billions in Nvidia chips while federal investigators looked into where they went. And a White House that was told about it, gave no warning, and is still backing him.
That's Everyone knows. The hard truth, the stuff nobody else will say, and the thing that keeps you going.
I'm Brian Bullock of Starborne Studios. Find me on X at Everyoneknows1. If this hits you, share it with someone who needs to hear it. Subscribe. Leave a review. Come find us at brianbullockwriter.com.
Because Everyone knows. Your Silence is your Consent.