US intelligence doesn’t know if businesswoman spied on Nvidia for China, doesn’t mean she wasn’t a risk, sources say

The US intelligence community is still working to understand the relationship between a Chinese businesswoman who had an affair with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and the Chinese government, with multiple sources telling CNN that intelligence gathered so far on her does not prove she was acting as a spy for Beijing.

There is disagreement among U.S. officials over the strength of the evidence that Alice Huang was recruited by China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS), China’s equivalent of the CIA, to spy on Jensen Huang – and, by extension, U.S. policymakers.

The FBI has been investigating Huang’s case for at least a year. But Attorney General Todd Blanche said Thursday that there was still “no conclusion drawn by the Justice Department, nor by me, nor by (FBI) Director Patel about who she is or is not.” President Donald Trump also wavered Thursday over whether the United States had determined she was a spy, when commentator Stephen A. Smith asked whether Huang was right to resign as CEO.

“Well, the most important thing is, was this woman a spy? And I don’t know if that’s been determined yet,” Trump said. “But if the woman was a spy, yes. If the woman wasn’t a spy, maybe it would be different.”

Some officials in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, including those close to Director Jay Clayton, have called the characterization of Alice Huang as a Chinese spy inaccurate and excessive, sources said. And CIA officials also aren’t yet convinced that the intelligence collected so far on Huang, including intercepted communications, proves she was knowingly redirecting information to Beijing, a source told CNN.

Still, some Trump officials told CNN it was hard to believe she was not acting as an agent of the Chinese government — simply by virtue of the fact that she is a successful Chinese businesswoman working for one of the most powerful companies in America..

Under China’s national security law, Chinese citizens can be forced to assist in intelligence collection on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party. Even if she hadn’t done so yet, given her access to Huang — and by extension, Trump — some officials believe she posed a clear counterintelligence risk. But for others, the fixation on Huang’s relationship with the Chinese government has obscured broader questions around the U.S. government’s failure to clamp down on the diversion to China of sophisticated technologies vital to the AI ​​race.

Alice Huang’s Singapore-based company Megaspeed is a major buyer of NVIDIA chips. The Justice Department and Commerce Department have opened an investigation into the company in 2024 — part of a broader probe into an ecosystem of foreign shell companies suspected of diverting restricted Nvidia chips to China, a person briefed on the investigation said.

Questions are now being asked at the White House about why the Commerce Department did not place Megaspeed on the so-called “entity list,” which restricts trade with companies that could pose a risk to U.S. national security or foreign policy interests — at least while the investigation was underway, according to a person close to it.

“An intelligence operation was not necessary to achieve this result,” a former Commerce Department official told CNN, noting that Jensen Huang had publicly advocated for the United States to sell more chips to China. The fact that chips could be diverted to China via Megaspeed was, in theory, a point where China’s interest already coincided with that of Nvidia – and “a regulatory loophole” already allowed it, the former Commerce official added.

Jensen Huang resigned from Nvidia on Wednesday, following days of reports that he had an affair with an alleged Chinese intelligence agent. Reports also emerged Wednesday evening that he separately had an affair with an Nvidia subordinate.

Democratic Rep. Jim Himes, ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, told POLITICO on Thursday that he left a classified briefing with senior intelligence officials earlier this week unsure about the nature of Huang’s relationship with the Chinese government.

“What is the relationship between Alice Huang and the Chinese, and what do we know about influence or information exchanged? Because today, at least, I don’t know,” Himes said.

Last year, when U.S. intelligence officials first learned of Huang and Alice Huang’s relationship, officials across the government immediately wanted to know more — and some began sounding the alarm.

Secretary of State and national security adviser Marco Rubio warned in a memo in the spring about Jensen’s relationship with Huang, a source told CNN. But it’s unclear how detailed the memo was about how much information Huang did or did not share with the Chinese government. Rubio briefed Trump on Jensen Huang and his relationship with Alice Huang aboard Air Force One en route to China in May.

The briefing took place before Jensen Huang joined Trump in Alaska for the final leg of the trip, a source briefed on the matter told CNN.

Different agencies continued to conduct their own intelligence reviews, sources said. A particularly alarming development occurred when U.S. intelligence obtained communications that appeared to indicate that a person with close access to Jensen Huang and Nvidia was the source of information that ended up in Chinese intelligence feeds, a person familiar with the investigation told CNN.

The FBI, which is leading the main counterintelligence investigation, told lawmakers last year that it was particularly wary of Alice Huang’s apparently sudden career change from reporter at Chinese state television to businesswoman with unusually high spending power in the Chinese economy, one of the sources said.

That, coupled with his close relationship with Nvidia’s then-CEO, continued to raise red flags within the office, where the counterintelligence investigation is still ongoing, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.

Definitively linking suspicious behavior by Chinese nationals interacting with the United States to a state-run espionage campaign remains a recurring problem for counterintelligence officials trying to defend against Chinese espionage. Gathering intelligence on China is notoriously difficult, and China routinely forces its citizens to do whatever it wants abroad.

When it comes to Chinese espionage, the threat is in the eye of the beholder: Some officials think fears are exaggerated, others see a Chinese spy in every encounter.

“A lot of these people are just guilty of being Chinese,” said a former senior counterintelligence official.

But Joshua Hodges, commissioner of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, which is investigating how U.S.-China trade and economic ties affect U.S. national security, said that “we have seen repeatedly that the Chinese are incredibly adept at using people, whether intentionally or unintentionally.”

“Ultimately, what we generally find is that these people, at some point, recognize that they know who they’re working for and they know the goals that they’re working toward,” he told CNN.

Hodges, who served on the National Security Council during Trump’s first term, pointed to Huang’s past rhetoric denouncing the phrase “China hawks” as “a badge of shame.”

“This is clearly intended to stop people from talking about the topic,” Hodges said. “You have the biggest, one of the biggest CEOs in the world, attacking people for speaking out about something they care about – that clearly only benefits one country.”

CNN’s Kristen Holmes and Alejandra Jaramillo contributed to this report.