U.S. Intelligence Believes Nvidia Executive Alice Huang Was a Chinese Asset; Key Questions Remain Unresolved

On Thursday, Jensen Huang stepped down as chief executive of Nvidia, and the reasons behind his departure are still being sorted out in Washington. People who have read U.S. intelligence reporting say American agencies believe the woman with whom he had an affair, Alice Huang, was a Chinese asset. They say she was using the relationship to help China get around American efforts to restrict its access to advanced A.I. chips.

What the agencies do not yet know is considerable. According to those people, officials are still assessing when she began working with China's top spy agency, whether her cooperation was willing or coerced, how much direction Beijing gave her, and how much she passed along. Her relationship with Mr. Huang gave her potential access to Nvidia's technology, to his strategic thinking, and to what he knew of Washington's debates over A.I. policy. She also had a commercial stake in the flow of chips.

Ms. Huang was a top executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore-based company that bought Nvidia chips and built data centers in Southeast Asia. Its customers included Alibaba, the Chinese commerce giant. Megaspeed was one of several companies in the region that supplied Chinese tech firms with the computing power needed to train advanced A.I. models. The Commerce Department opened an investigation into whether Megaspeed was helping illegally divert Nvidia chips to China, an inquiry that began well before the current scandal and that the Justice Department took over last year. Singapore authorities also questioned Ms. Huang last year. Her whereabouts now are unknown, and she has not responded to outreach from The New York Times.

People briefed on the intelligence say she appears not to have been a trained intelligence officer but an "asset," someone secretly giving information to the Ministry of State Security, China's main civilian intelligence service. Multiple people who reviewed the underlying material said it showed she was working with that agency, and U.S. agencies are confident in their information about her contacts with Chinese intelligence. Chinese espionage, though, covers a wide range, from executives simply reporting what they know to taking active direction. Current and former officials said Chinese business leaders often believe they cannot advance without aligning with the state, and when approached to gather information or press an American company for high-end chips, many may feel they have no choice.

The concern was taken seriously enough that President Trump was briefed twice, late last year and again this spring. Secretary of State and national security adviser Marco Rubio delivered one of the briefings. He had also overseen a memo dated March 30, sent to a handful of Cabinet secretaries, detailing Ms. Huang's close relationship with the Nvidia founder and her contacts with the Ministry of State Security. U.S. intelligence has been surveilling her for well over a year, and she was already close to Mr. Huang when it began. Pinning down when she started giving information to Chinese intelligence matters for judging what she might have gathered.

Mr. Trump, who has seen Mr. Huang as an ally in keeping American A.I. superiority and as a driver of the economy, has defended him. He said this week that Mr. Huang told him he did not know of Ms. Huang's ties to Chinese intelligence. In an interview with the podcaster Stephen A. Smith, asked whether Mr. Huang should have resigned, Mr. Trump said: "The big thing is, was the woman a spy, and I don't know if that's been determined yet. But if the woman was a spy, yes. If the woman was not a spy perhaps it would be different."

Attorney General Todd Blanche said at a Thursday news conference that the Justice Department has a role in investigating whether advanced chips were sold to China in violation of export controls. Such a violation, he said, could be civil, regulatory or criminal depending on the case, and the investigation is ongoing. He sidestepped a question on whether the department has assessed Ms. Huang's role.

The spying allegations were not the only factor. Mr. Huang resigned after admitting to the affair and after Nvidia's board began investigating the relationship. On Wednesday, The Times reported he had conducted another affair, with an executive who reported directly to him.

Next week Mr. Trump travels to Asia, where he is scheduled to meet President Xi Jinping, who has made catching the United States in A.I. a top priority. The open questions about Ms. Huang will travel with him, alongside the continuing export-control inquiries.