There’s a specific mantra drilled into government workers, military officers, and intelligence personnel during counterintelligence briefings: “If she’s a 10 and you’re a 5, she’s a spy!” Or, as the US Army’s Counterintelligence Command posted on Valentine’s Day: “It doesn’t take a mathematician to figure out ‘10 + 5 = honeytrap.’” The very beautiful woman who is suddenly interested in your very ordinary existence probably has ulterior motives, is the message.

Jensen Huang surely doesn’t live a typical life—he’s a centibillionaire, the swashbuckling CEO of Nvidia, one of the hottest and most geopolitically consequential companies of the 21st century. Surely he’s aware of the possibility that he’d cross paths with intelligence assets. In fact, it’s hard to think of many companies in the world that would be a higher priority target for foreign intelligence agencies.

All of that makes the stock-shaking news this week all the more surprising. How did Huang get embroiled in a spy scandal that mixes infidelity, international espionage, the Trump administration, and the economic behemoth of the multitrillion-dollar AI industry?

The story kicked off just before Halloween, with a six-byline story in The New York Times reporting that Huang was the target of a Chinese spy plot. Starting somewhere between 2024 and 2025, Huang allegedly had an affair with Alice Huang (no relation), a one-time executive at a Singapore-based cloud provider known as Megaspeed. US intelligence agencies warned top US officials that they believed she was a Chinese intelligence asset. So far, Nvidia’s board, which has launched its own investigation, says it has “no reason to believe that either national security or Nvidia secrets were compromised,” but that’s far from the only concern.

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