Rubio Oversaw Classified Memo Warning Officials About Jensen Huang's Spy Links, NYT Says

The Times said Rubio's involvement shows that top officials were already worried about the relationship by last spring, months before it became public. That timing matters for Nvidia because the administration went on to approve licences for its H200 chips to be sold to Chinese buyers.

The woman is Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le, an executive at Megaspeed International, a Singapore-based data centre company that belongs to Nvidia's cloud partner network and buys Nvidia equipment to rent computing power to AI developers. The Times reported that US intelligence believes she was recruited by China's Ministry of State Security, which was seeking more detail about American AI chips and possibly to persuade Nvidia to make its most advanced semiconductors available in China. The Financial Times, citing multiple sources, reported that the memo described a romantic relationship between the two. It is unclear when or how they met.

Nvidia declined to comment on the memo. In an earlier statement, the company said its cloud partners do not ask it to seek changes in US law or to lobby for sales to China, and that it neither has nor shares classified information with customers. Huang said in an interview the previous week that his dealings with Megaspeed were "normal and not unusual" and that Nvidia had checked that Megaspeed did not illegally ship its AI processors to China, Bloomberg reported.

China's foreign ministry denied the reports. The White House and the CIA declined to comment.

The matter has drawn attention from both parties. Republican leaders of the House select committee on China, along with the foreign affairs and intelligence committees, have asked Huang to attend a closed-door session to answer questions about Alice Huang and Nvidia's protections against foreign espionage. Democratic Senator Chris Coons has said Congress will investigate. No charges have been announced and the memo has not been made public.