Don’t take Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s ‘sex’ scandal at face value

“I thought spooks were supposed to be stealthy,” the uncouth, flatulent anti-hero Jackson Lamb complains in the hit British spy series Slow Horses as an annoying underling loudly enters his rundown office building, known to fans as Slough House.

I have no idea if Alice Huang, the alleged love interest of billionaire Jensen Huang – who resigned as Nvidia CEO on Thursday – is really a Chinese Mata Hari. My own knowledge of espionage is confined to reading John le Carre and Robert Ludlum, and watching James Bond and six seasons of Slow Horses. To that, you may perhaps add Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery.

So far, all the photos of Alice Huang I have seen in mainstream media show the two (unrelated) Huangs appearing together in glamorous settings such as a banquet or a cocktail bar. Short of kissing each other openly, the pair appeared quite relaxed together.

If Alice Huang was a spy, she had not been stealthy about it; rather the opposite. Neither had the pair bothered to hide that they knew each other.

In news reports, she has been variously described as founder, managing director and executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore-based cloud computing and data processing company. Megaspeed has extensive business with Nvidia, including dealing in the latter’s advanced chips such as Blackwell, which the United States bars from sale to China.

Naturally, US investigators and intelligence officers took an active interest in Alice Huang and her company. In fact, her public appearances with Jensen Huang practically painted a target on Megaspeed and herself.

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Her alleged identity as a Chinese spy was reportedly known for about a year to the highest echelon of the US government, including President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

We don’t know whether Trump and Rubio, or their intelligence officers, did anything about it. Perhaps US operatives have been using Jensen Huang to feed bad information to the Chinese the whole time? Who knows? Maybe the Chinese side finally caught on, so Alice Huang’s last use for US intelligence was to be exposed, thereby embarrassing the Chinese and forcing Trump’s hand. Who knows?

Trump has called Huang an “honourable guy”. China hawks in Washington have complained that Trump is being too soft on President Xi Jinping. The scandal broke just days before the two leaders are due to meet at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Shenzhen.

Perhaps I have been watching too much spy TV. Anyway, I think it’s clear that Alice Huang’s real identity is less interesting or relevant than the timing and manner of the disclosure, unless, of course, you are Jensen Huang’s wife Lori, with billions of dollars at stake in any potential divorce settlement.

Strategically planting leaks in the press, whether to misdirect, embarrass, discredit, derail or defame, is one of the oldest tricks of spycraft. They almost always come with a hidden agenda other than the public’s right to know.

Unlike me, some real experts have compared this supposed sex scandal to the spy balloon incident of 2023, in which a US fighter jet shot down off the South Carolina coast what the Chinese government said was a weather balloon that had veered off-course.

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Some have pointed out that US hawks could exploit the current allegations to push for tougher AI chip export curbs. Maybe someone very powerful in Washington doesn’t like or trust Jensen Huang and wanted to push him out as CEO.

Zhu Feng, dean of Nanjing University’s school of international studies, said US congressional hearings would make the matter “another balloon event” in US-China relations. He expects an “increased crackdown” on China’s hi-tech sectors.

Fudan University’s Xin Qiang said the row was unlikely to derail ties but could directly hit Nvidia’s chip exports, with tighter oversight even of less advanced processors. Tsinghua’s Sun Chenghao said there was no public evidence of Chinese government involvement, making a balloon-style crisis unlikely, though scrutiny could disrupt trade talks.

Spies get caught all the time. Sometimes they are tortured and killed, or so I have read. Other times, they are detained or jailed, often to be used in prisoner exchanges. Sometimes, they are turned into double agents. On that, I cite the literary authority of le Carre and Ludlum.

Maybe Alice Huang was never a spy, just someone innocent caught up in a hidden but high-stakes intelligence war between two superpowers. Or she was just a lousy spy. We will never know.

But I think this could be made into a spy comedy or a serious thriller, with Maggie Q as Alice Huang and Michael Wong Man-tak as Jensen Huang. Wong always looks good in a leather jacket. Nicole Kidman could play the wife.