Imagine you run a company that makes some of the most tightly export-controlled products on earth. Part of your job, a big part, is meeting customers: flying around, having dinners, being charming to people who buy a lot of your stuff. Some of those customers are in Asia, because that is where a lot of the buyers are. Now suppose one of them turns out, according to US intelligence agencies, to have been passing information to Beijing the whole time. What did you do wrong? Maybe nothing. Maybe you should have been told. Maybe you were supposed to have noticed. These are hard questions, and Congress would like to ask them in person.
Here is the real version. Three House Republican chairmen, Brian Mast of Foreign Affairs, John Moolenaar of the Select Committee on China and Rick Crawford of Intelligence, have asked Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang to attend a joint, closed-door briefing about his dealings with Alice Huang, an executive at the Singapore data-center company Megaspeed, as the Financial Times reported via Ars Technica. The committees’ announcement calls her “a publicly reported People’s Republic of China (PRC) intelligence asset.” The lawmakers also want to hear about Nvidia’s security protocols against “foreign adversary espionage.” They proposed Nov. 18 and asked Huang to accept that date or offer another by Nov. 11. It is a request, not a subpoena, as The Hill noted.
The phrase “publicly reported” carries a lot of weight there. What has been publicly reported is a New York Times story from last month saying US spy agencies concluded last year that Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le, who has no known family relationship to Jensen Huang, was passing information to Beijing while building a “close relationship” with the Nvidia CEO. According to the Times, officials first believed he didn’t know about her alleged intelligence work, and President Trump, of whom Huang is an ally, was briefed but reluctant to get in the way of Nvidia’s chip sales or US-China trade. Nobody has been charged with anything. Megaspeed says it follows the law and denies wrongdoing.
Nvidia’s defense comes in two parts. The first is about what a customer actually gets out of Jensen Huang:
Our regional cloud customers receive ordinary business information—not sensitive Nvidia trade secrets—and zero information relevant to national security.
Translated: if you are a spy and you get close to the head of Nvidia, what you learn is the sales pitch. The company has also said Huang’s “interactions with Ms. Huang are not unusual or unexpected,” and a spokesperson told CNBC that “meetings with customers are part of a CEO’s job.” Huang himself has told Bloomberg that Nvidia’s dealings with Megaspeed were normal and that Alice Huang no longer works there. I find this a fairly persuasive argument, up to a point. A CEO who has met a lot of people knows things that aren’t trade secrets but might still be interesting to a foreign government: who is buying what, which customers are getting priority, what Nvidia thinks Washington will do next. “Ordinary business information” is not a category the people across the table at a closed intelligence briefing are likely to accept at face value.
The second part is about warnings. The Times reported that Huang never got a “defensive briefing,” the heads-up the intelligence community usually, though not always, gives people it thinks are espionage targets. Nvidia’s answer is that it is confident the government would have told it if it saw someone as a threat to US industry, and that it often hears from Washington about people of concern.
Notice how that works. The report says the government didn’t warn Huang. Nvidia says the government didn’t warn Huang, so there was nothing to worry about. Both statements rest on the same fact. Nvidia reads the silence as reassurance; the committees seem to read it as part of the problem. If US agencies really did conclude last year that a Megaspeed executive was working for Beijing and then didn’t tell the person she was reportedly cultivating, that seems like a question for the agencies as much as for Nvidia. Still, Nvidia is the one that got the letter.
Chips and secrets
There are really two different worries here, and they tend to get mixed up. One is chips leaking: Nvidia hardware ending up in China despite US export controls. The other is information leaking. Megaspeed has history on the first. It was founded in 2023, spun off from a Chinese gaming company, and US authorities have looked at it before over possible chip smuggling, though no charges followed. When Nvidia learned of those concerns, it carried out its own unannounced on-site inspections at Megaspeed in Singapore and found no evidence its chips were going to China, according to people familiar with the matter. Nvidia told The Hill that Megaspeed was a regional customer and that the claims were debunked last year.
That’s a reasonable answer to the chip question. You can walk into a data center and count the GPUs. It isn’t much of an answer to the espionage question, which is about what got said over dinner, and you can’t audit that by turning up unannounced at a server room. When asked about protocols, Nvidia said Huang has an “outstanding security team” that travels with him. I’m sure that’s true. But a travel security team is there to stop people getting physically close to the CEO, and the allegation here is about someone he chose to get close to.
The scrutiny lands at an awkward time. US export controls have pushed more Nvidia chips into smuggling channels, and the arrests catch only a fraction of them. Earlier this year Wally Liaw, a co-founder of Supermicro, one of Nvidia’s key supply-chain partners, was arrested in the US and charged with smuggling Nvidia chips into China. He denies wrongdoing and has pleaded not guilty.
The politics are odd too. Huang is close to a Republican president who, according to the Times, didn’t want to disrupt his chip business, and the people now asking him to come in and explain himself are three Republican chairmen. Nvidia hasn’t said yet whether he’ll go. He has until Nov. 11 to reply. By Nvidia’s own account, sitting down with people who want something from you is part of a CEO’s job.