NVIDIA’s new laptop chip has a partner you might not expect

China's Ministry of State Security, the country's primary intelligence agency, reportedly recruited Alice Huang, who worked for Singapore's Megaspeed data center firm, to spy on NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, according to The New York Times. This recruitment was part of China's broader efforts to gain insights into the U.S.'s artificial intelligence plans and potentially influence the U.S. government to allow the export of advanced chips to China.

Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA, the world's leading AI chip producer, had previously convinced President Trump to permit some chip models to be sold to China. The Financial Times also reported that U.S. officials believed Huang and Huang were romantically involved, based on information from American intelligence. However, Trump and select American officials were informed of this before Trump's visit to Beijing earlier this year with Huang and Elon Musk, and Trump did not take any action regarding this information.

Huang was not briefed that he was being targeted by the Chinese government. Megaspeed, a major NVIDIA customer, had purchased billions of dollars worth of AI chips from the company, building data centers in Southeast Asia to rent out computing power to Alibaba, thereby granting the Chinese firm access to restricted NVIDIA chips.