Huang’s affair with suspected Chinese spy complicates Nvidia’s China issue

Continue Nvidia The chipmaker’s relationship with China is coming under intense scrutiny in Washington, D.C., after CEO Jensen Huang admitted on Sunday that he had an affair with suspected Chinese spy Alice Huang.

Nvidia’s operations in the world’s second-largest economy have shrunk since the Biden administration announced sweeping regulations in October 2022 to limit China’s ability to obtain advanced U.S. chips. In October 2025, months after stricter rules were put in place by the Trump administration, Huang said: “We are 100% out of China.”

The latest allegations against Mr. Huang have thrown the chipmaker into crisis, while also drawing attention to the Nvidia CEO’s potential influence over U.S. policy regarding chip sales to China, where the company’s business once flourished. Of particular interest is whether the restricted Nvidia chips reached the Chinese company through customers such as Singapore-based Megaspeed, which has ties to Alice Huang.

The New York Times first reported that the Chinese businessman was a spy for China’s Ministry of State Security, according to people briefed on the information circulated in a memo within the Trump administration this spring. China calls the allegations defamatory.

Jensen Huang worked closely with President Donald Trump during his second administration, helping advise the White House on AI safety regulations while also pushing for loosening regulations on sales of AI chips to China. In December, President Trump said he would allow Nvidia to ship H200 chips to China on the condition that the United States receives 25% of sales. In March, Huang told reporters that Nvidia “has received purchase orders and is in the process of resuming production.”

According to the New York Times, Mr. Huang was a last-minute addition to the list of tech executives who accompanied President Trump on his trip to China in May after the White House briefed the president on intelligence concerns.

“In the past 35 years, I have never seen a semiconductor company CEO have such direct influence over export policy,” Patrick Moorehead, CEO of Moore Insights and Strategy, said in an email.

The mood in Washington has changed since last week’s midterm elections, which gave Democrats overwhelming victories across the country. Following this weekend’s revelations about Mr. Huang’s extramarital affair, three House committees requested a private meeting with Nvidia’s CEO about his relationship with MegaSpeed.

Democratic lawmakers seeking control of both houses of Congress have said publicly that Congress will investigate and demand answers. President Trump said on Monday that he was “surprised” by the allegations and that Hwang had told him “I didn’t know she was a spy.” President Trump said at a White House briefing that the FBI is currently investigating the matter.

It’s been a long four years in China for Nvidia.

Before the first export restrictions in 2022, China accounted for nearly a quarter of Nvidia’s revenue. Nvidia has responded to the Biden administration-era regulations by redesigning some of its products to comply with the new regulations.

“It’s been a hectic month or so as the company has gone through some adversity trying to redesign the product,” Huang told CNBC in a 2023 interview. Still, he was confident the company could continue selling chips to China. “I think we’re OK in terms of our ability to serve customers there,” he said.

Nvidia has redesigned another AI graphics processing unit, the H20, for China after the Biden administration tightened export controls again. The Trump administration restricted sales of the H20 after reports that Chinese model developer DeepSeek was using restricted Nvidia chips. Nvidia revealed it will incur $5.5 billion in costs related to canceled orders for its redesigned chips.

However, the company maintained its operations in the region, even though it said in its forecast that it was “assuming 0% for China.” Last fiscal year, NVIDIA reported that about 9% of its revenue came from China, including Hong Kong, but also from sectors outside of restricted data center chips, such as gaming, automotive and industrial. In the most recent quarter, Nvidia’s sales in China accounted for 8%.

A May report from short seller Calper Research claimed that Nvidia’s China exposure was much higher. According to the report, the company said more than 20% of Nvidia’s fiscal year 2026 is due to China, backed by “illegal GPU diversion and intermediaries in Southeast Asia.”

The loophole allows Chinese companies to rent Nvidia GPUs in their data centers even if outright buyouts are restricted. For example, Chinese companies can lease Nvidia computing power in Europe by renting server capacity from non-Chinese neocloud or data center operators that are exempt from export controls.

Nvidia did not respond to requests for comment on this story.

Singapore-based Nvidia customer Megaspeed has been accused of diverting its own supply of Nvidia’s restricted AI chips to Chinese companies. Megaspeed has denied wrongdoing and said inspections found no evidence of violations.

In 2025, Nvidia changed the way it reports regional sales, breaking them down by customer headquarters instead of where products are billed. Nvidia also stopped reporting sales in Singapore around the same time.

“Megaspeed’s question of whether Blackwell chips made it to China has been going on since before this week,” Moorhead said, pointing to a December 2025 Bloomberg report that found Megaspeed was importing 50,000 more Nvidia chips than its own data centers had tallied.

In 2025, a House of Representatives Select Committee began investigating whether China’s DeepSeek would work with Nvidia’s chips.

A separate investigation by the U.S. Department of Commerce focused on MegaSpeed. The investigation was suddenly transferred to the Department of Justice after Nvidia’s general counsel sent an email to the Commerce Department requesting information about the investigation, The New York Times reported.

This restriction isn’t just coming from the US, as China continues to restrict imports of NVIDIA chips into the country, limiting NVIDIA’s sales in China. The United States has authorized the sale of the H200. alibabaTencent, ByteDance and other Chinese companies, but the Chinese government has not approved large-scale imports, Moorhead told CNBC. Nvidia said H200 shipments to China accounted for less than 1% of data center revenue in the quarter ended July.

Moorhead expects more export control legislation to be passed as a result of the recent turmoil. Proposals could allow Congress to monitor chip export licenses and require chipmakers to put in place security mechanisms to track the location of chips to see if they find a route to China.

“Every license in China is reading this article now,” Moorhead said. “Mr. Jensen has been Nvidia’s leading voice on China, but his voice is becoming weaker.”

—CNBC’s Kif Lethwing and Seema Modi contributed to this report.

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