How Nvidia CEO’s Affair Became a National Security Nightmare

On an evening in Taipei in 2024, a group of tech executives are gathered at a rooftop bar. This is a crew that kind of likes to party. They're sitting around a table, and there's this woman there, and they're talking to her and just chatting. At some point in the night, Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA, one of the most valuable companies in the world, comes up in conversation. In Taiwan in particular, Jensen Huang is like a rock star. He's like this total celebrity, and anytime he goes anywhere, he gets requests for autographs. People want to take selfies with him. He gets mobbed by even ordinary people on the street. The woman says she knows him. She says, you know, I'm great friends with Jensen Huang, and I'm pretty sure I could get him to come and have a drink with us. And the guys around her are like, yeah, totally, do it. And she takes out her phone and sends a couple messages, and a few minutes later, Jensen Huang shows up. Huang orders a whiskey. He holds forth briefly with the gathered executives, and then he says he's tired and leaves alone. That's according to a person who our colleague. Robbie Whelan spoke to. The guy I talked to who was there at this table, he said, you know, they didn't seem especially close. There was no clue that they were anything more than just friends. And he didn't think much of it. Would you like to know what happened next? Yeah, I would. I would very much like to know what happened next. That woman, it turns out, is a woman named Alice Wong. And she is, according to. U.S. intelligence reports, she's a Chinese spy. And she had an affair with Jensen Huang. That story blew up over the weekend. We are monitoring NVIDIA this morning, following CEO Jensen Huang admitting that he had an affair with a woman who's been accused of being a Chinese spy. NVIDIA boss Jensen Huang is now under investigation by his company's board after reports that he was targeted in a foreign intelligence effort. NVIDIA's board expressed confidence in Huang and said it had, quote, no reason to believe that either national security or NVIDIA's secrets were compromised. The idea that Chinese intelligence may have gotten to the CEO of NVIDIA is a huge, huge deal. Because what it means is that at a time when there's a huge debate about who we should give our best technology to, who should be allowed to buy it, what countries should be able to have access to the technology that's going to allow them to win the AI race, we have the guy who's most important in that world, Jensen Huang, getting involved with a woman who is, according to U.S. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Kate Leinbaugh. It's Tuesday, November 10th. Coming up on the show, how Jensen Huang's affair spiraled into a national security nightmare. The long answer can cost you more than a slow one. That's why nine Fortune 10 companies now run on Claude for the work they want to get right. Safety and accuracy are not just line items for Anthropic. That's their whole mission. See how Claude can support your business at claude.ai slash the journal. This episode is brought to you by Indeed. Running a business means dealing with the dreaded hiring process. And the stakes are high when the right hire comes. Indeed could make or break your business strategy. But good news. Indeed's sponsored jobs is here to make things less painful and nerve-wracking. It gives your job post a boost to reach quality talent faster. Plus, it can help put your job in front of exactly who you're looking for based on criteria you set. Like if you need certain skills or certifications. And it works. Sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed are 95% more likely to report a hire than non-sponsored jobs. So spend less time searching and more time. And actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. When Alice Wong was on that rooftop bar in Taipei, she was a tech executive. Before that, she'd been a reporter for Chinese state TV. And she's a little bit mysterious. She really kind of only emerged on the global tech scene, so to speak, in the last three or four years. But she has been involved in doing big deals for AI chips, you know, matching customers and data center providers all over Asia for a number of years. All right. So what do we know about the affair, sort of, and how and when Alice Wong and Jensen Huang, no relation, met? So they meet mainly through a customer relationship. She works for a company called Megaspeed. And what exactly is Megaspeed? Megaspeed was a company that was established in 2023 as a spinoff of a Chinese company. Megaspeed has emerged as one of the biggest companies in the world. It's one of the biggest buyers of NVIDIA's chips in all of Asia. What they do is they build data centers and they stuff them full of NVIDIA's chips. They build them in places like Malaysia and Singapore. And they sell that computing power that the chips give them to hundreds and hundreds of customers around Asia. Alice Wong was an executive at Megaspeed. That's how she came to know Jensen Huang. But there's a lot we don't know about her, including when she allegedly became. a Chinese intelligence asset. According to our reporting, she was a tech executive who became involved with Jensen Huang and was recruited by Chinese intelligence rather than starting out as a spy and then going out and finding a way to become connected to Jensen Huang. One thing that people have noted in my conversations is that she and Jensen were not particularly careful about being seen in public, about being seen even in sort of affectionate positions. There's one photo of her where she's sort of got her face nuzzled up against the side of his face. She's been with him in contexts where, you know, he's greeted by reporters and fans and it's not clear why she's there. Investigators noticed this close relationship. Authorities in Singapore and Taiwan put physical surveillance teams on Alice Wong, the journal has reported. Singapore's Ministry of Home Affairs has denied that authorities there have investigated her for alleged ties to China. U.S. officials were also investigating Megaspeed as far back as the end of 2024. The United States government has been investigating Megaspeed, the company, for possible violations of export controls. So what that means is they're being accused or investigated for suspected smuggling of American microchips. Specifically, NVIDIA's chips into China. The Justice Department and the Department of Commerce have had an active investigation, our reporting shows, into Megaspeed since at least last year. We also know that their name has come up, the name of this company has come up repeatedly as a candidate for what's called the entity list. The U.S. entity list is the naughty list for foreign companies that the government sees as bad enough actors that they should be prohibited from doing business with the U.S. government and with U.S. companies. Megaspeed isn't on that list. NVIDIA stopped selling its chips to the company last year, but investigators have looked at whether Megaspeed's data centers were providing compute to Chinese entities. Megaspeed couldn't immediately be reached for comment. The company has previously said it is a legitimate and compliant company that didn't engage in illegal activities. But we do know that there was enough there, enough smoke, that there are some people within the Trump administration who have repeatedly raised the name of this company and saying we shouldn't be doing business with them. AI is considered so central to the U.S. economy and national security that the government has imposed strict controls on NVIDIA's most powerful chips, limiting exports to China. We've got this very tense relationship between NVIDIA and the government. NVIDIA wants to be in China. They're being told, no, they can't be in China. And at the same time, there's this whole ecosystem of people who are trying to get around these really strict export rules to provide computing access to people in China. And Alice Huang is suspected of being one of those people. Coming up, the fallout of this affair for one of America's most valuable companies. This episode is supported by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. In business, a wrong answer can cost you more than a slow one. Have you ever wondered how movement start? I'm Ashley C. Ford, host of Into the Mix, a Ben & Jerry's podcast about joy and justice. This season, we're talking to unexpected progressive heroes who found purpose in unexpected places. People like Marley Diaz, making sure every kid sees themselves in books. Kyle Mesteth, a native skateboarder building a movement for kids nationwide. Joy Aladakun, whose music moves from protests to daily commute. Find out how they started something bigger than themselves and listen wherever you get your podcasts. On Sunday afternoon, NVIDIA's board announced it was conducting an independent investigation into whether CEO Jensen Huang was the target of a foreign intelligence effort. That same day, Huang acknowledged his affair in a note to the company's staff. The message says, I owe my family and all of you an apology. He then goes on. He says, I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I'm deeply sorry, which is scandalous on a number of levels. Jensen's been married to his wife, Lori, for about 40 years. They have two kids. They have this, they're all, all of them are very involved in the company and its charitable foundation. Some of his family actually are his employees. The note went on to directly address the NVIDIA team. Regarding the national security concerns raised in news reports, NVIDIA's board of directors has initiated an independent investigation. I support the investigation and will cooperate fully. I love our country and our company. I am committed to protecting NVIDIA and supporting America's national security. So what do you make of this statement? I think this letter is totally extraordinary. There's two things going on here in this letter. One is he's apologizing to his family for this moral lapse or this sort of ethical lapse that he had, he committed in cheating on his wife. But then he immediately goes from there to my colleagues at NVIDIA, you deserve better from me. And he wants to reassure us that he's totally committed to protecting NVIDIA and supporting America's national security. Suddenly it's like, whoa, it's like, wow, we're talking about an affair here. Now we're talking about a problem. We're talking about America's national security. In what way could national security have been compromised? Okay, so there are two main interactions that NVIDIA has with national security. Number one is the very sort of direct technological one, which is that better AI can mean better military capabilities. It can mean better missile targeting. It can mean better military intelligence. AI can, for better or for worse, help countries win wars. And so. So if NVIDIA has inadvertently done something that allows the Chinese to get better AI by getting access to NVIDIA's chips, then that could compromise American national security by helping China develop better AI. Then there's this broader interaction that people talk about a lot, which is what does AI have to do with national security in the context of kind of the big AI race that's going on between the U.S. and the United States? Right, the global race for AI dominance, et cetera. The global race for not just AI dominance, but also for achieving artificial general intelligence. This idea that maybe machines one day will have the same intellectual capabilities as humans. Maybe they will think as well as humans, reason as well as humans. And every country on Earth, but primarily the U.S. and China, has a vested interest in making sure that the country that is dominant in AI is using it for the right reasons. If this relationship in some way compromised NVIDIA's commitment to follow U.S. law and keep its chips out of China, then that has very serious implications for the AI race. It means that there's a lot of developers of AI tools and AI models in China who potentially have access to the chips that are going to help them overtake the U.S. Huang is well aware of these dynamics, and he's been cultivating a tight relationship with President Trump. He and his wife went to a million-dollar-ahead fundraiser for Trump at Mar-a-Lago in early 2025. And Trump regularly seeks Huang's advice on AI policy. For instance, at a conference in September called the All-In Summit, their relationship was on full display. Jensen actually got a phone call, coincidentally, from President Trump, and they put the phone on speakerphone up against the microphone. Really? On stage, yes. Hold on, sir, we're getting a microphone. Mr. President, you're now talking to the planet. See, the great thing about life is that Jensen can develop. Jensen Huang was being asked, should we slow down AI? A lot of people are very worried that AI might destroy civilization, have huge, terrible consequences for society. Should we slow it down? Should we put more guardrails on it? On speakerphone, the president called those. Those fears a hoax. And we're not going to let that happen. It's a hoax. You're right, we're not going to let that happen, sir. No, we're not going to let it happen. And he said, I'm sort of paraphrasing here, but Jensen said, no, sir, Mr. President, you can be assured, we're not going to slow down AI. We're not going to let them slow things down. It's important that America wins the AI race. Jensen really has the president's ear, so much so that the president's calling him, and asking for public assurances about what's the right path to go forward on in terms of AI policy. Yesterday, in the White House briefing room, Trump was asked about the affair and whether he still trusts Huang. I asked him that question, did you have any idea that she was a spy? He said, I had no idea that she was a spy, and I really believe him. Yeah, please. Robbie, what is all of this going to mean for Jensen Huang? You know, in the long term, what this seems very likely to cause, in my mind, is a loss of credibility on Jensen's part. Because at the very least, if it's true that this woman, Alice Huang, is a Chinese intelligence asset, if what the U.S. intelligence services think is true, that she's a spy, it at the very least speaks to like a real failure of judgment on his part. Not to mention getting involved with a company that's not a spy. Of course, yeah, getting involved with a customer as well. But it's going to make it harder for policymakers in Washington to take him seriously when he makes arguments. There's a lot of really, really serious arguments going on in Washington. Like people saying, look, I think we should, we're being too heavy handed about AI. We should be selling this stuff to them so that they get hooked on our technology and we have more control. These are like very serious policy arguments that are going on. And Jensen has been personally involved in that. I mean, he is there all the time these days, meeting with cabinet secretaries, talking to Howard Lutnick from commerce, talking to all sorts of people from energy department, from the state, war. And the narrative he's trying to push is, it's not only safe for us to sell NVIDIA's products in China, it's a good idea because it will give us more power and more control over the global market. But at the very least, when he's in those meetings now, there's going to be this cloud hanging over them. This is the guy who got taken. Taken in by a Chinese intelligence asset. At least that idea, whether or not it's true, it's going to be there behind every conversation he has. And my take is that it's going to be harder for him to make persuasive arguments about how the government should think about NVIDIA and about advanced AI technology when, you know, he's got this stain on his reputation. Do you have any sense of whether Alice Wong was able to get information out of Jensen Huang? We don't know what, if any, information that's sensitive Jensen Wong may have repeated to Alice Wong. It's too early to know what that might be. But we have good reason to believe that U.S. officials are very concerned that she may have passed some information on. Attempts to reach Alice Wong were unsuccessful. Two people in concert, Contact us. with her earlier this year said she was in China at the time. Her current whereabouts are unknown. That's all for today, Tuesday, November 10th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. Additional reporting in this episode by Amrith Ramkumar. Thanks for listening. We're off tomorrow for Veterans Day. See you Thursday. Are you ever shopping online and suddenly a discount that helps you save pops up? It makes your day, sometimes even your week. Want that feeling month after month? Well, new customers who save by switching their home and auto insurance to Progressive save hundreds. Cue your happy dance. Get your quote today at Progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers not available in all states. The Secret Society of Semi-Homemade? Listen up. Sam's Club has pre-made dishes for a Thanksgiving feast that's ready in two hours. All while tasting suspiciously homemade. Come join us. Sam's Club. Individual oven times may vary.