US intel isn’t sure 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 the intelligence collected on her to date does not prove that she was acting as a spy for Beijing.

There is disagreement among US officials about the strength of the evidence that Alice Huang was recruited by the Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS), the Chinese equivalent of the CIA, to spy on Jensen Huang — and, by extension, on US policymakers.

The FBI has been investigating Huang’s affair for at least a year. But Attorney General Todd Blanche said on Thursday that there are still “no conclusions reached by the Department of Justice, or by me, or by [FBI] Director Patel around who she is or is not.” President Donald Trump also hedged Thursday on whether the US had determined she was a spy, when commentator Stephen A. Smith asked whether Huang was right to have stepped down as CEO.

“Well, the big thing is, was the 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 was not a spy, perhaps it would be different.”

Some officials at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, including those close to director Jay Clayton, have framed the characterization of Alice Huang as a Chinese spy as not entirely accurate and over-torqued, sources said. And officials at the CIA also are not yet convinced that the intelligence collection on Huang to date, including intercepted communications, proves she was knowingly funneling information back to Beijing, a source told CNN.

Still, some Trump officials told CNN that it strains credulity to believe that 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 with one of America’s most powerful companies.

Under Chinese national security law, Chinese citizens can be compelled to help gather intelligence on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party. Even if she had not done so yet, given her access to Huang — and by extension, to Trump — some officials believe she posed a clear counterintelligence risk. But to others, the fixation on Huang’s relationship to the Chinese government has obscured broader questions around the US government’s failure to crack down on the diversion to China of sophisticated technology vital to the AI race.

Alice Huang’s Singapore-based company Megaspeed is a major purchaser of NVIDIA chips. The Department of Justice and the Commerce Department began an investigation into the firm 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.

There are now questions brewing inside the White House over why the Commerce Department did not put Megaspeed on the so-called “entity list,” which restricts trade with companies that may pose a risk to US national security or foreign policy interests — at least while the investigation was ongoing, according to a person familiar.

“An intelligence operation wasn’t necessary to achieve that result,” a former Commerce Department official told CNN, noting that Jensen Huang has publicly advocated for the US to sell more chips to China. The fact that chips might be diverted to China through Megaspeed was, theoretically, a place where China’s interest already coincided with Nvidia’s — 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 had an affair with a suspected Chinese intelligence asset. Reports also emerged on Wednesday night that he separately had an affair with a subordinate at Nvidia.

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

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

Last year, when US intelligence officials first learned of the relationship between Huang and Alice Huang, 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, one source told CNN. But it is unclear how detailed the memo got on how much information Huang was or was not sharing 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 occurred before Jensen Huang joined Trump in Alaska for the final leg of the trip, a source briefed on the matter told CNN.

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

The FBI, which is conducting the primary counterintelligence investigation, told lawmakers last year that it was particularly suspicious of Alice Huang’s seemingly overnight career pivot from Chinese State television journalist to businesswoman with an unusually large amount of purchasing power in the Chinese economy, one of the sources said.

That, paired with her close relationship to the then-Nvidia CEO has continued to raise red flags inside the bureau, where the counterintelligence probe remains ongoing, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.

Definitively linking suspicious behavior by Chinese nationals interacting with the United States to a state-directed spying campaign remains a perennial problem for counterintelligence officials trying to defend against Chinese espionage. It is notoriously difficult to collect intelligence on China, and China routinely compels its private citizens to do its bidding overseas.

When it comes to Chinese spying, the threat is in the eye of the beholder — some officials think the fears are overblown, other officials see a Chinese spy in every encounter.

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

But Joshua Hodges, a commissioner on the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, which investigates how US-China trade and economic ties affect American national security, said that “we’ve seen repeatedly the Chinese are incredibly adept at using people both wittingly and unwittingly.”

“Ultimately, what we typically see is those people, at a certain point in time, recognize that they know who they’re working for and they know the ends that they’re working towards,” he told CNN.

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

“That clearly is directed to make people stop talking about the topic,” Hodges said. “You’ve got 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.