Last week, news broke that the leather-jacketed C.E.O. of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, had been spending an awful lot of time with Alice Huang, a Chinese national and the face of Megaspeed, a Singapore-based data-center company. According to The New York Times, citing U.S. officials, she was also a Chinese-intelligence asset.
The U.S. spooks were already concerned that Megaspeed was trying to circumvent U.S. export controls by smuggling Nvidia’s restricted semiconductor technology into China. While investigating the company, they discovered the relationship between Huang and Huang (no relation), and alarm bells began to ring, not least because of the Nvidia chief’s close connections to Donald Trump.