Nvidia says it was unaware of intelligence concerns involving Alice Huang

BBC sources say Huang’s removal appears unlikely

Nvidia said it was not aware of intelligence concerns involving Alice Huang. “We trust that if we were the target of a genuine threat, the US government would have notified us,” an Nvidia spokesperson told the BBC. The company’s response came after Nvidia’s board announced a probe on Sunday following New York Times reports that chief executive Jensen Huang had engaged in a romantic relationship with a woman believed by US intelligence to be a Chinese spy.

The New York Times reported that US officials had concluded Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le, was recruited to spy by China’s top intelligence agency. Alice Huang was a top executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore-based data centre company suspected of helping divert Nvidia chips to China, a concern Nvidia maintains was investigated and debunked. Surveillance reportedly revealed communications between Alice Huang and an American citizen who was subsequently identified as Jensen Huang through a process known as “unmasking.”

It remained unclear what information Alice Huang allegedly passed to Beijing, how valuable it was or when she was believed to have begun gathering intelligence. Alice Huang did not respond to the New York Times’s request for comment.

The BBC said the board appeared to have little appetite for removing Huang, and the board said it had “confidence in Jensen and his leadership team.” BBC sources separately said the 63-year-old chief executive’s removal appeared unlikely because substantial financial interests were at stake and no clear successor was available. Huang released a statement that said, “I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry.”

Huang had long been close to Trump during the administration’s technology competition with China, as Trump pushed for the US to maintain its technological dominance over China. Trump has repeatedly said the two nations are in a race for dominance and has said, “whoever wins AI wins.” The BBC reported a fear that if China gained the upper hand in AI, it would supercharge the country’s military and surveillance capabilities.

At a recent AI summit at the White House, where 42 technology executives were present, Trump was flanked by Elon Musk and Huang. Trump said he had not spoken with the Nvidia chief executive since news of the investigation emerged. “I just know he’s a fine person, but you never know what’s going on,” Trump told reporters, adding that Huang had “done an amazing job for our country.”

The BBC said the US advantage was built in large part on companies such as Nvidia working with producers such as the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, which makes more than 90% of the world’s most advanced chips. Since 2022, the US has used various export controls to keep top technology out of China, which the US said helps retain its competitive edge and protects national security. Those controls have largely locked Nvidia out of what the BBC described as the world’s most lucrative market.

Huang once said Nvidia’s share of the Chinese market had gone from around 95% to effectively zero. In recent years, Huang engaged in a flurry of shuttle diplomacy between Washington and Beijing, seeking a US-approved route back into the Chinese market and shaping US policy toward China along the way. The BBC said Sunday’s revelations may explain why Huang had failed to secure the administration’s blessing to sell all but Nvidia’s most advanced chips to China. Nvidia has remained locked out of that market quarter after quarter despite Huang’s close relationship with Trump and his role in US policy.

The BBC described the 63-year-old Huang as one of the technology industry’s most high-profile figures and as the face of the AI boom. Born in Taiwan in 1963, Huang was nine years old when his family moved to the West Coast of the US. He graduated as an electrical engineer from Oregon State University and then earned a master’s degree in the same field from Stanford University. He subsequently worked at US chip firm AMD before co-founding Nvidia in 1993 with fellow electrical engineers Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem.

Nvidia was originally known for chips that process graphics, particularly for computer games, before eventually changing its focus to AI, a field the BBC said it now dominates. Huang was once lauded as the “Taylor Swift of tech” and is commonly referred to as “Daddy Huang” in Taiwan. He rose to prominence as Nvidia became one of the world’s most valuable companies. The BBC reported that Nvidia was worth some $4.5 trillion, making it one of the most valuable companies ever, while the Bloomberg Billionaires Index put Huang’s estimated fortune at $155bn.

Stephen Witt, the author of Thinking Machine, a biography of Huang, told the BBC, “Jensen Huang is a tech visionary of the likes of Steve Jobs,” adding that Huang was responsible for creating AI hardware as it exists today. Witt said that in 2012, when machine-learning neural-net researchers began using Nvidia chips for that purpose, Huang immediately recognized it would become a massive industry and the future of computing. Huang then directed enormous resources toward building what was essentially the AI hardware market.

Witt contrasted those early years with the giant data centres familiar today, which did not exist when Huang began building the market. He said there were no customers for the hardware and that the first customer was Open AI, then a company of 30 people, to which Huang donated the hardware.

Witt said Alex Krizhevsky’s Alexnet was the first real neural net of modern times on an Nvidia network and that it was trained on two Nvidia cards in Alex’s bedroom. The modern equivalent, he said, uses 200,000 to 300,000 cards in a giant barn full of computers called a data centre. “Jensen runs a tollbooth. All of that goes through him,” Witt said, adding that the infrastructure buildout made Nvidia at least temporarily the most valuable company in the world.

Huang met his wife, Lori, at Oregon State University, where she was also studying electrical engineering and was his lab partner. They married in 1985, about eight years before he co-founded Nvidia, and have two children, Madison and Spencer. Huang credited Lori and Madison for making black leather jackets his signature style. A Getty Images caption said Lori Huang accompanied her husband at the state dinner President Donald Trump held for his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping in September.

The couple founded the Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang Foundation in 2007. The BBC reported that the charitable fund’s assets surged in recent years because of the soaring value of Nvidia shares, leaving it worth an estimated more than $9bn. Its donations included tens of millions of dollars to engineering programmes at Oregon State and Stanford University.

Witt said Huang had gone to great lengths to present himself as a family man and that this was very important to him. Witt also said Huang praised his wife and talked about her in very glowing ways. Witt said Madison and Spencer both work for Nvidia, that Huang kept his children very close and that the fallout would be bad for anyone’s family and very bad for Huang.

BBC News’ report was written by Lily Jamali, its North America Technology correspondent, and business reporter Peter Hoskins, with additional reporting by Ayeshea Perera in Singapore and Helen Davidson in Sydney.