US memo says China recruited Megaspeed executive to gather information on Nvidia's CEO

A memo based on US intelligence claims that China's Ministry of State Security recruited Alice Huang, a former executive at the Singapore-based data center company Megaspeed, to gather information on Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang. The two are not related. The New York Times first reported the memo. The Financial Times then reported that the memo also describes a romantic relationship between the two. Neither paper has published the document, and no US agency has confirmed it.

The allegations matter because of where Megaspeed sits. It buys Nvidia's most advanced AI chips, and US investigators have spent more than a year looking at whether those chips reached Chinese companies that export controls are supposed to keep them from. The memo adds a second worry to that case. The concern is no longer only where the hardware goes. It is also who can get close to the people who decide where it goes.

What the memo reportedly says

According to the Financial Times, citing people familiar with the matter, US officials prepared the memo earlier this year, shortly before President Donald Trump travelled to Beijing in May for a summit with Xi Jinping. It went to a small group of senior officials. The New York Times had already reported that US intelligence considered Jensen Huang the target of a Chinese intelligence operation.

Seoul Economic Daily, summarising the reporting, says US authorities suspect China tried to obtain AI and semiconductor information through Alice Huang and to push Nvidia toward supplying advanced chips to China. The two met at a bar in Taipei in June 2024, according to the Times. Alice Huang could not be reached for comment.

An Nvidia spokesperson told the Times that Jensen Huang's interactions with Alice Huang were "not unusual" and that the company does not share classified information with its customers. Nvidia has also said its chief executive meets thousands of customer executives every year. China's Foreign Ministry, responding to earlier reports on 30 October, called them "groundless speculation and nothing but slander and smears against China", according to Seoul Economic Daily. Senior Republican lawmakers have asked Jensen Huang to appear privately before House committees on China, foreign affairs and intelligence to answer questions about Nvidia's security protocols.

Megaspeed and the chip supply question

Megaspeed was created in 2023 when 7Road, a Chinese gaming and cloud computing company with state-backed investors, split off its Singapore-based overseas business. In October 2025 the New York Times reported that Megaspeed had bought nearly $2 billion of Nvidia's most advanced products, about $1 billion of it in its first three months. Most of the chips came through the US arm of Inspur, a Chinese firm sanctioned for supporting the Chinese military. They went to data centers in Malaysia and Indonesia that appeared to serve customers in China remotely.

The US Commerce Department has been investigating whether Megaspeed helps Chinese companies get around export restrictions. Singapore's police said investigations into the company for suspected breaches of domestic law were ongoing. Megaspeed says it complies with all applicable laws, including US export controls, and has said it will cooperate with the US government.

Nvidia says it found no evidence of diversion. According to the Times, its compliance team concluded Megaspeed was owned and operated outside China with no Chinese shareholders, and staff visited its facilities several times. Nvidia describes Megaspeed as running a small commercial cloud, which US rules allow. That distinction is the weak point of the current regime. Export controls govern where a chip is shipped. Remote cloud access lets a customer use the chip from somewhere else.

A second case: an authorized buyer with an empty office

A separate New York Times report looked at New Matrix, a Chinese company the Commerce Department has authorized to buy advanced Nvidia chips. At the office address New Matrix listed, reporters found "a hollow gray shell", according to TechCrunch's summary. That raised concerns that the company could be a front for a blacklisted private equity firm.

The case shows the other side of the same system. Since late 2025 the US government has allowed some advanced chip sales to approved Chinese commercial customers. Those approvals depend on checks of who the buyer really is. A licence is only as reliable as the paperwork behind it. Nvidia's spokesperson said the company sells "the first, best and most of our technology in America."

What it means for work

Access to frontier AI chips is now controlled through a small number of decisions: which buyers get licences, which cloud operators get hardware, and which executives get a meeting. Compliance teams at chipmakers, cloud providers and data center operators carry most of the work of checking ownership, inspecting sites and tracing where compute is actually used, and both cases show how hard that is when chips can be rented remotely or a buyer exists mostly on paper. Senior people at those companies are also treated as security targets now, which brings stricter rules on who they meet and what they discuss. For AI developers outside the largest firms, the effect is more paperwork, more scrutiny of intermediaries and less certainty about which suppliers will still be allowed to sell to them. What remains open is whether the memo's claims hold up, whether the Megaspeed and New Matrix inquiries lead to findings, and whether the rules will start to govern remote access to chips as well as shipments.