US investigated alleged Chinese spy plot targeting Nvidia CEO

A top executive of a Singapore AI cloud firm accused of illegally selling Nvidia chips to China could also have been a Chinese spy, anonymous sources told the New York Times.

The executive, Alice Huang (or Huang Le), worked for Megaspeed and was photographed alongside several people accompanying Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at various business dinners in the Singapore region. The Times reports that U.S. intelligence agencies had been surveilling Alice Huang for about a year to learn more about her ties with China.

Sources said the concern was that Alice Huang had grown so close to Jensen Huang that she could have been gathering information about Nvidia's plans and the CEO's efforts to convince the Trump administration to allow it to ship more advanced technology to China.

But an Nvidia spokesperson denied this, telling TechCrunch that the CEO's relationship with the Megaspeed executive was the same as with any other regional customer.

"Jensen's interactions with Ms. Huang are not unusual or unexpected. Meetings with customers are part of a C.E.O.'s job; Jensen talks with thousands of customer executives every year," the spokesperson said in an emailed statement. The company also said "Our regional cloud customers receive ordinary business information—not sensitive NVIDIA trade secrets—and zero information relevant to national security."

In 2025, the Times reported that the Commerce Department had investigated Megaspeed over concerns that it was helping Chinese companies sidestep AI chip export regulations by reselling restricted chips to them. Alice Huang was said to be a top executive for the firm at the time.