英伟达事件The Nvidia Affair

An illicit relationship between the C.E.O. and an alleged Chinese spy is putting the spotlight on a murky ecosystem of companies smuggling A.I. chips into China.

The news this weekend could have been ripped from a Hollywood thriller: The founder and chief executive of Nvidia, one of the world’s most valuable companies, admitted to an affair with a woman who, according to U.S. intelligence, is a spy for China. The scandal could have enormous implications for a company that is crucial to America’s strategic advantage on artificial intelligence.

It’s also shining a spotlight on a group of companies, like the one where the woman was an executive, that seem to exist primarily for one purpose — to help Chinese companies gain access to Nvidia’s chips, the crucial commodity needed for A.I. data centers. Today, my colleague Alicia Wittmeyer writes about that ecosystem. Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia, in March.

Manuel Orbegozo for The New York Times The murky company behind the Jensen Huang affair By Alicia P.Q. Wittmeyer What, exactly, did Megaspeed do?

The Singapore-based firm that employed Alice Huang, the woman who had an affair with Jensen Huang, bought roughly $2 billion of Nvidia products over the past few years.

But when my colleagues visited some of Megaspeed’s offices last year, dug through corporate records and interviewed dozens of people about the company’s operations, what they found was perplexing.

In Megaspeed’s Singapore headquarters, located in a shiny building in the central business district, only two employees were present. There was also a separate Malaysian subsidiary, registered at a dilapidated storefront outside Kuala Lumpur, and another Malaysian office, located in a shopping mall. When one employee emerged in the mall, she was asked what the company did. “It’s not clear,” she responded.

U.S. officials already suspected Megaspeed of smuggling Nvidia’s most advanced chips into China. When U.S. officials paid their own visit to a Megaspeed data center in 2024, they found much of the Nvidia equipment it had ordered was still in boxes — not typically the way you treat costly products you intend to use yourself.

Megaspeed is now under even more intense scrutiny because of Jensen Huang’s affair with Alice Huang, a Chinese citizen who U.S. intelligence officials say was recruited by the Chinese Ministry of State Security. The Chinese government has denied Alice Huang is a spy Alice Huang has not responded to attempts to reach her for comment in recent days.

Nvidia’s board has opened an investigation into Jensen Huang, one of the most powerful figures in the A.I. revolution and an influential ally of President Trump. Among the questions hanging over the investigation: Was the relationship between Nvidia and Megaspeed influenced by the affair? And what role did the Chinese government play?

But Megaspeed, which said yesterday it was conducting an internal investigation into allegations of chip diversion, is not the only mysterious company with murky ties to China that has gained access to America’s most advanced A.I. technology. The front reception area of Megaspeed’s Malaysian subsidiary.

Amrita Chandradas for The New York Times Smuggling networks and front companies In 2022, with a growing sense that the U.S. and China were in a race to develop the world’s most advanced A.I., the U.S. government imposed what my colleagues called “one of the most extensive technological blockades ever attempted.”It barred the sale of America’s most advanced A.I. chips directly to China.

But it didn’t take long for various businesses to find ways around the restrictions. Megaspeed, which started out as a Chinese gaming company, spun off from its parent company to set up shop in Singapore in 2023.

In 2024, my colleagues paid a visit to a market in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen and found vendors selling the very chips the U.S. was trying to keep out of Chinese hands. One vendor shared evidence that he had recently shipped a batch of servers with more than 2,000 of Nvidia’s most advanced chips into China for more than $100 million.

Smuggling and underground markets were one route through which Chinese companies gained access to these chips; front companies were another. My colleagues have painstakingly documented instances of ties between newly founded companies and the Chinese military, and links between Chinese parent companies and foreign subsidiaries that allowed them to avoid American blacklists.

The Trump administration has approved dozens of Chinese companies some with ties to firms under national security sanctions, to buy and handle Nvidia chips.

In other instances, the chips don’t actually need to make it into China at all. Southeast Asia has become a hub of what’s called offshore computing, a legal practice in which America’s advanced A.I. chips, which can be used to develop and operate new cutting-edge A.I. models, are used in data centers housed in countries like Thailand, Vietnam or Malaysia. Their computing power, though, is still routed to companies based in China.

Blowback News of Huang’s affair has rocketed around the globe, generating shock waves from Taiwan to Silicon Valley to Washington. U.S. lawmakers have asked him to appear for a closed-door briefing. An Nvidia spokesman said the company had worked “to help government and our partners halt any would-be smugglers while serving the critical market of lawful customers that help America win worldwide.”A lot is still unknown, not just about what exactly happened but also about how it is going to play out in terms of A.I. policy. Huang has been among the strongest opponents of restrictions on A.I. He has also opposed restrictions on chip sales and argued for allowing Nvidia to sell its products more freely. It’s harder for him to make that argument now.

At the same time, lawmakers who have long been critical of the tech industry see the affair as an opening. Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat who has sponsored legislation that would tighten oversight on chip exports and crack down on the ecosystem that gave rise to Megaspeed, has called for legislation “to keep our advanced A.I. technology out of China’s hands.”The upshot is that Jensen Huang’s affair could well alter U.S.-China relations and, perhaps, the course of the A.I. race between the world’s two largest economies. The implications go far beyond what China’s spymasters may have had in mind when they allegedly gave Alice Huang her assignment. Nvidia shares dropped even as the broader stock market rallied. What to know about Nvidia’s investigation of its chief executive.

Jensen Huang has a tight grip on Nvidia, with no obvious successor MORE TOP NEWS Brook Mitchell/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Russell Brand, the comedian, actor and conspiracy-minded YouTuber, was sentenced to 10 and a half years in prison for rape and sexual assault.

The Trump administration deported people to countries that then sent them to places U.S. courts had deemed too dangerous, a New York Times investigation found After a nine-month lull, U.S.-led talks to end the war in Ukraine are set to resume in Abu Dhabi today. France blamed Iran for the cyberattacks on supermarket refrigerators last month.

China’s trade surplus surged past $1 trillion in the first 10 months of this year, eclipsing last year’s record-setting pace. Dozens of Senegalese migrants trying to reach Europe died after their boat capsized last week. Poland’s government blamed the far right for inspiring a gunman in a mass shooting.

A Republican lawmaker introduced articles of impeachment against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, forcing a Congressional vote that must be taken within two days.

BOOKER PRIZE Kirsty Wigglesworth/Associated Press M. John Harrison’s “The End of Everything,” a science-fiction novel that imagines aliens overrunning Britain, won the Booker Prize Our reviewer called the book “a masterly exercise in restraint, unsettling beauty and elliptical writing.”TOP OF THE WORLD The most clicked link in your newsletter yesterday was about giant roadside attractions DEMISE OF THE DAY Eli Durst for The New York Times The Tesla Cybertruck Elon Musk’s company recently announced the death of a car that one of my colleagues called “a sci-fi stainless-steel origami shark on wheels.”Tesla sunk about $2 billion into development and production of the vehicle, which became a lightning rod in the culture wars.

MORNING READ Hilary Swift for The New York Times Kelly Holley-Bockelmann never expected to be starting over at age 55.

Nobody in her house had finished college. But she became a theoretical astrophysicist and a top adviser to NASA. She helped start a program for astronomers and raised millions to recruit American scientists with backgrounds as unlikely as her own, only to watch that pipeline be dismantled piece by piece by the Trump administration.

The space observatory that had become her life’s work was marked for elimination in the federal budget, twice. One by one, the scientists around her did the math and chose to leave the United States. Finally, she decided to join them.