China's Spy Service Recruited Executive Close to Jensen Huang, New York Times Says

The recruitment claim takes the affair a step beyond the paper's first report on October 29. That report said Alice Huang had developed a close relationship with Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang and that intelligence officials viewed him as the target of a Chinese spy operation. The two are not related. The new account puts Nvidia, the world's most valuable chipmaker and the company at the centre of the US-China contest over AI hardware, under more pressure ahead of a congressional briefing scheduled for November 18.

According to the Times, the ministry wanted Alice Huang to collect information about American AI chips and "potentially influence the company to push for its most advanced chips to be made available to China." The paper said she also has "relationships with executives at the highest levels of the A.I. chip industry," including leaders at the Taiwanese hardware maker Gigabyte.

The Times's earlier reporting, based on interviews with people briefed on the surveillance, said President Trump was told about the relationship about a year ago and chose not to act on the information. Jensen Huang has appeared alongside Trump at state dinners, AI summits and on foreign trips.

Megaspeed is a Singapore-based cloud provider that the Times said had previously been suspected of helping companies get around US export controls, which bar shipments of Nvidia's top AI chips to China. Nvidia has rejected that suspicion. "The diversion allegations against this regional cloud were thoroughly investigated and debunked last year," a company spokesperson told CNBC after the first report.

Nvidia has also played down the significance of its chief executive's contacts. Its regional cloud customers "receive ordinary business information" and "zero information relevant to national security," the company said in a statement. "Meetings with customers are part of a CEO's job; Jensen talks with thousands of customer executives every year," it added, saying it was confident the US government would let it know if it believed any person was a threat to American industry. Megaspeed did not respond to CNBC's request for comment.

The new details reach Capitol Hill a day after three House Republican committee chairs asked Jensen Huang to appear in person. In a letter dated November 4, Brian Mast of the Foreign Affairs Committee, John Moolenaar of the Select Committee on China and Rick Crawford of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence requested a joint, closed-door briefing on his interactions with Alice Huang and on Nvidia's "security protocols against foreign adversary espionage."

"It is vital that Congress determines the extent to which U.S. national security has been placed at risk," the chairs wrote. Nvidia did not say directly whether Huang would attend.

The allegations land while Nvidia's China business is already constrained from both sides. Washington cleared the company's H200 chip for shipment to China earlier this year, but Chinese regulators have blocked imports, and Nvidia wrote off about $4.5 billion of AI chips designed for the Chinese market last year.

The requested briefing is set for November 18, the day after Nvidia reports its third-quarter results, when analysts are likely to press executives on China and on the company's controls over where its chips end up.