CEO Jensen Huang may have been the target of Chinese espionage activity, The New York Times reports.

The companies behind powerful AI technology are high-stakes territory for international espionage. A new investigation from The New York Times published Thursday found that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang may have been the target of Chinese spying activity, with the US government identifying a data center executive with whom he had developed a “close relationship” as a possible operative for the Chinese government.

Alice Huang, no relation to Jensen, is a Chinese citizen and an executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore-based data center company. Megaspeed buys chips from Nvidia to run data centers that sell compute to Chinese AI labs, including Qwen AI maker Alibaba. But while US intelligence agencies had her under electronic surveillance for allegedly facilitating the sale of advanced Nvidia chips to China in violation of US law, officials discovered she was also allegedly funneling information to the Chinese government in Beijing.

There are no details about what information Alice Huang may have shared with China, or how valuable it might be, though the Times reports that an investigation and surveillance of her are ongoing. Jensen Huang was not given a heads-up by the US government because it could have risked the US’ investigation into the Megaspeed exec, the Times said, citing people with knowledge of the matter.

An Nvidia spokesperson told CNET that Jensen Huang’s interactions with Alice Huang are “not unusual or unexpected” given that the CEO “talks with thousands of customer executives every year.” Nvidia added that customers like Megaspeed are “no different than many other regional cloud customers” that don’t receive sensitive trade secrets, and the company is “confident that if the US government believes that any person is a threat to American industry, it would let us know.”

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