China on Friday hit out at reported US intelligence allegations that a suspected Chinese spy had targeted Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang, dismissing the claims as “groundless speculation” aimed at smearing Beijing.

“The relevant report is based on groundless speculation and [is] purely aimed at smearing and slandering China,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun told a regular media briefing in Beijing.

The pushback came after US outlet The New York Times reported on Thursday that US intelligence agencies had identified a Chinese businesswoman, Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le, as a suspected Chinese asset who had approached and tried to develop a close business relationship with the Nvidia chief.

US agencies believed that Huang, an executive at Singapore-based data centre firm Megaspeed, had been passing information to Beijing, according to the report. The two Huangs are not related.

Megaspeed had previously come under US scrutiny over suspicions that the company was helping China circumvent US export controls on advanced semiconductors, the report said, citing anonymous officials with access to classified intelligence.

The news report also said US officials initially believed Nvidia’s Huang was unaware of the woman’s alleged intelligence activities, while no evidence showed that the Nvidia chief had knowingly shared sensitive information with her.

The allegations come amid heightened US scrutiny of chip exports to China, as Washington seeks to restrict Beijing’s access to premium chips critical to training advanced artificial intelligence models, citing national security concerns.

In a statement to the South China Morning Post on Friday, an Nvidia representative said that “Megaspeed has been no different than many other regional cloud customers” and that “Jensen’s interactions with Ms. Huang are not unusual or unexpected”, as meetings with customers were part of a CEO’s job.

The company added that “the diversion allegations against this regional cloud were thoroughly investigated and debunked last year”, according to the statement. Megaspeed did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday.

Once a major market for Nvidia, China has become increasingly difficult for the US chip giant to navigate, as Washington’s tightening export controls on advanced AI chips have severely restricted its sales to the country.

Meanwhile, Chinese chipmakers from Huawei Technologies to Moore Threads, among others, are gaining ground on Nvidia as Beijing accelerates efforts to achieve semiconductor self-sufficiency.

Beijing-based Moore Threads, often hailed as China’s “little Nvidia”, reported on Wednesday a nearly 1,774 per cent surge in third-quarter revenue to 1.55 billion yuan (US$232.4 million). It attributed the gain to robust domestic demand for graphics processing units used for AI model training and inference across cloud providers, telecommunications operators and computing centres.