Guardian column identifies Alice Huang as suspected Chinese spy unrelated to Nvidia chief
Megaspeed said it had offered to cooperate with the US government’s investigation into suspected smuggling of Nvidia’s advanced chips but those offers went unanswered, according to a Guardian US opinion column by Moira Donegan, a Guardian US columnist, published Nov. 12.
Megaspeed, a Singapore-based technology company, was under investigation by the US Commerce Department on suspicion of smuggling the advanced chips to China, which is banned from importing them by US law, the column said. The column described Megaspeed as one of the largest purchasers of Nvidia’s advanced chips.
The column identified the woman as Huang Le, also known as Alice Huang, with no relation to the Nvidia chief executive. Alice Huang worked in television in China before becoming an executive at Megaspeed. Donegan described Alice Huang as a suspected Chinese spy.
The column said it is unclear how much the woman learned from her relationship with Jensen Huang, or how the information she may have gathered could undermine US economic and military interests.
According to the New York Times, the investigation was abruptly halted last year after the general counsel for Nvidia, Jensen Huang’s company, intervened, the column reported. Among other things, Jensen Huang is known for his close relationship with Donald Trump.
On Sunday, Jensen Huang issued a statement admitting to an affair, and his company announced that it would be launching an investigation into the incident, the column said. “The Board has no reason to believe that either national security or NVIDIA secrets were compromised,” the board’s statement said — language Donegan called “perhaps a bit too hopeful.”
Donegan wrote that the statement itself reflects the depth of Huang’s control over the country: if ordinary people had endangered corporate secrets and state security in a flight of reckless, narcissistic frivolity the way Huang may have done, she wrote, their employers would not be announcing the investigation while they kept their jobs.
Nvidia’s stocks were down when the markets opened on Monday, the column reported, and Donegan wrote that they may well go down further still. The column described Nvidia as one of the country’s largest companies and the manufacturer of advanced chip technology that is powering the US’s AI boom, and wrote that Huang’s midlife crisis is now a problem for the US economy and potentially for national security.
Donegan argued that the episode illustrates the cost of concentrating authority in one person. When one man becomes synonymous with a company, she wrote, untold numbers of other people live and die by that man’s decisions, and when his decisions are bad it is other people who pay the price. She wrote that spreading power and responsibility across multiple people limits the fallout from one person’s character flaws and makes any one man disposable and replaceable.
Donegan framed the affair and its fallout as a product of what she described as an era of massive inequality, tightly consolidated corporate leadership and rule by a billionaire class with large egos and deficient dignity.
In her account, loyalty to Donald Trump among major Silicon Valley companies began as a strategic move to ensure favorable contract and regulatory terms and has grown into a fuller embrace of the ideology and style of the far right. Donegan wrote that the tech industry has become reckless and irresponsible, proud of itself for accelerating technologies it plainly claims to be unable to control, demanding investments in datacenters and government contracts from taxpayers whom it smugly brags about putting out of jobs, and flooding aesthetic and informational life with what she called low-grade slop that is frequently factually inaccurate and often dangerous for vulnerable users.
She also wrote that the leaders of this industry seem oblivious to how they appear to other people, and that, perhaps insulated by their money and their sycophantic underlings, it does not occur to them that nobody wants the future they are ushering in, the one they are insisting everyone must pay for.