US officials suspect Nvidia CEO may have known about China spy's activities: Report

File photo: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang

A top executive at a Singapore-based data centre company, Megaspeed, was under scrutiny for possibly steering advanced Nvidia AI chips to China, according to a report in New York Times.

American officials had concluded that she was a Chinese intelligence asset, sending information to Beijing.The report claims that surveillance of the executive, Alice Huang or Huang Le, a Chinese citizen, revealed that she had developed a close relationship with Jensen Huang, Nvidia's chief executive.In a startling revelation, the report says President Trump was briefed about the intelligence findings but chose not to do anything.

He has been wary of disrupting Nvidia's chip sales, which are helping to drive the economy and the stock market, and of further complicating the trading relationship with China.Washington has been working to deny China the technology needed to match or surpass US in AI. The discovery that Beijing was getting reports from someone with direct access to Jensen Huang, who is also an ally of President Trump, had set off alarm bells ringing at White House.

Nvidia's chief executive has successfully lobbied the administration during Trump's second term to roll back tighter restrictions on the sales of the company's chips to China. He also negotiated a deal with Trump that allowed US govt to take a 25% stake of certain Nvidia chips that govt allows to be sold to China.When the Trump administration was considering a ban on sales of Nvidia chips to China, Huang and his wife travelled to Mar-a-Lago to convince Trump to allow chip companies to do business with Beijing.Nvidia later donated at least $20 million to Trump's ballroom fund, a person with knowledge of the matter said. The company also pledged to invest $500 billion on manufacturing in US.The account of Alice Huang's activities is based on interviews with people briefed on the surveillance, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The surveillance of Alice Huang continues, they said, and companies that have been affiliated with her continued to buy Nvidia chips this year.Nvidia said it had previously debunked claims that Megaspeed was smuggling chips to China. John Rizzo, a spokesman for Nvidia, added that customers like Megaspeed "receive ordinary business information - not sensitive Nvidia trade secrets - and zero information relevant to national security". Megaspeed is among the companies that buy chips to build data centres and then rent their computing power to companies in China.White House, CIA and National Security Agency declined to comment. Alice Huang did not respond to requests for comment. In a statement to NYT, Megaspeed said its "current leadership" takes the matter "extremely seriously and is committed to getting to the facts behind allegations". Liu Chang, spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington, said US was pursuing a campaign of "groundless smears and slanders" against China.