New Delhi: For years, Nvidia President and CEO Jensen Huang has argued that the United States cannot afford to shut China out of the global artificial intelligence race. He has urged Washington to compete with Beijing rather than isolate it. Huang warned that China has the manufacturing capacity, talent and technological ambition to become a formidable rival. Now, reports that Chinese intelligence sought to cultivate a relationship with Huang have brought an unexpected personal dimension to that debate.
Huang’s argument has been that treating China as a market to be abandoned would ultimately benefit Chinese chipmakers, particularly the global technology conglomerate Huawei, while weakening America’s position in the global AI industry.
Speaking at Nvidia’s GTC conference in Berlin in October this year, Huang warned that the US needed to take China’s technological capabilities seriously.
“We’ve got to recognise that we have very, very serious competition,” he said, adding that “if there’s one country that could manufacture things at scale,” it was China.
The Taiwan-born businessman has also made the case that allowing Nvidia to sell chips in China is in America’s strategic interest. Keeping Chinese customers within Nvidia’s ecosystem, he argued, gives them an alternative to domestic suppliers such as Huawei and prevents Beijing from accelerating its efforts to build an entirely indigenous AI-chip industry.
Trump administration and a China push
Huang was among those who pushed the Trump administration to reconsider restrictions on Nvidia’s sales to China. In 2025, he helped persuade President Donald Trump to relax a ban and allow the sale of a less powerful Nvidia chip. The two later agreed to permit limited sales of the company’s second-most-powerful chip, with the US government receiving 25 per cent of the revenue.
But Huang’s support for engagement has not extended to giving China access to America’s most advanced technology.
In May, he said China should not receive Nvidia’s Blackwell chips or the upcoming Rubin generation. The US, he argued, must retain “the first, the most and the best” even as American companies compete in international markets.
His criticism of export controls has nevertheless remained sharp.
In an interview recorded in October, Huang described China as “not our enemy” and argued that restricting chip exports was a strategic mistake that could end up strengthening Chinese competitors rather than holding them back.
He has extended a similar argument to artificial intelligence models. Huang has called Chinese AI models “excellent” and dismissed the possibility that they would drive American companies out of the market. He has argued that the availability of open-source models from China could expand AI adoption globally, rather than necessarily threaten companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
That position has now acquired a different context following reports about Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le, a former executive at Singapore-based data-centre company Megaspeed, a major Nvidia customer.
According to The New York Times, US intelligence agencies concluded that Alice Huang had been recruited by China’s Ministry of State Security to cultivate a close relationship with Jensen Huang and gather information. Beijing has rejected the allegations as “groundless speculation”.
The relationship was initially presented by Nvidia as part of a normal customer interaction. But Huang later acknowledged to the company’s board that he had been intimate with Alice Huang, a Chinese citizen and former senior executive at Megaspeed International. He also apologised to employees for being unfaithful to his wife.
“My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry. My responsibility is to serve you and be worthy of your trust. I have fallen short of that responsibility,” Huang wrote in an open letter.
Nvidia’s board has since initiated an independent investigation, overseen by independent directors and outside legal counsel.
“The NVIDIA Board is initiating an independent investigation in light of recent reporting that founder and CEO Jensen Huang has been the target of a foreign intelligence effort,” the company said.
It added that it had “no reason to believe” that US national security or Nvidia’s trade secrets had been compromised, but would examine all available information.