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Alice Huang, along with her husband and sister, built a network of companies across China and Singapore to acquire Nvidia chips, according to the report.
Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump’s close ties with Nvidia boss Jensen Huang faced renewed scrutiny on Monday after the company’s CEO admitted to having an affair with an alleged Chinese spy, Alice Huang. Pushing for a probe to determine whether our national security was compromised, Senator Chris Coons, a Delaware Democrat, said, “We need answers about the relationship between Artificial Intelligence (AI) billionaires and the Trump administration, who’s making these decisions, and who’s really got their hand on the wheel.”
Trump has so far defended Jensen, saying, “I did speak to him … He said he had absolutely no idea that the person in question was a spy”, but also confirmed that the FBI is already probing the case. Last month, The New York Times reported that Jensen had a relationship with Alice, an unrelated former executive of Singapore-based company Megaspeed, who the US authorities investigated and concluded to be a Chinese intelligence asset, passing information to Beijing. Huang, in an email to Nvidia employees, Sunday said that he had been unfaithful to his wife and took “full responsibility” for his actions.
Following this, Nvidia said it has launched an investigation into whether its CEO was the target of a foreign intelligence effort. In pre-market trading on Monday, Nvidia’s shares tumbled sharply, and when the markets opened, the shares were down by nearly 8 per cent to $171.80, BBC reported. Notably, shares of Nvidia had hit a lifetime high in October.
