A Chinese businesswoman who had a close relationship with the chief executive of one of the most important artificial intelligence companies in the United States was a spy for China’s Ministry of State Security, Beijing’s top intelligence agency, according to people briefed on U.S. surveillance.
The businesswoman, Alice Huang, was recruited by the ministry to collect intelligence on Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia, as part of a drive to learn more about American A.I. chips and potentially influence the company to push for its most advanced chips to be made available to China, the people said.
Mr. Huang, an influential ally of President Trump’s, is a pivotal figure in the intense global competition for A.I. supremacy. Nvidia’s advanced chips are sought after around the world, and the company’s growth has helped drive the stock market over the past several years.
The assessment by U.S. officials that Ms. Huang was working directly for the main Chinese intelligence agency has not previously been reported. It adds important new detail to what appears to be an especially audacious example of China’s longstanding industrial espionage efforts.
China’s interest in Mr. Huang, and precisely what Beijing hoped to achieve by having one of its intelligence assets begin a close relationship with the executive, have been a focus of U.S. spy agencies. Those questions are now also of interest to Capitol Hill. On Thursday, the Republican leaders of three influential House committees requested that Mr. Huang appear before them later this month in a closed-door briefing regarding his interactions with Ms. Huang, who is not related.
The New York Times reported last week that Mr. Huang was a target of a Chinese intelligence operation, and that U.S. intelligence agencies were conducting electronic surveillance of Ms. Huang, a Chinese citizen, for at least a year. The Times reported that Mr. Trump had been briefed last year about Mr. Huang’s relationship with her, but chose not to do anything about it.
Ms. Huang speaks English well and has relationships with executives at the highest levels of the A.I. chip industry, including Mr. Huang and the leaders of Gigabyte, one of the top assemblers of Nvidia supercomputers, said people who have met her. She has attended industry conferences and private executive dinners.
It is unclear when Ms. Huang first met Nvidia’s leader. In 2024, around the time the two of them were photographed together at a bar in Taipei, her company, Megaspeed, began a multibillion-dollar purchase of advanced A.I. microchips.
To many in the industry, the well-funded push by Megaspeed into A.I. appeared to come out of nowhere.
Ms. Huang was connected to a network of companies and investors clustered around Shanghai and Zhejiang province that had used their ties to local officials in Shanghai to push aggressively from mobile video games into data centers, which provide the computing power behind artificial intelligence.
Megaspeed has been building data centers in Southeast Asia and then renting their computing power to Alibaba, the giant Chinese internet firm, giving China a backdoor way of getting access to advanced Nvidia chips. Nvidia is restricted by the United States from selling those chips directly to China.
Beyond its local connections, the network also has a financial link to the Chinese military establishment, through an investment in a cybersecurity subsidiary of China Electronics Technology Group, one of the country’s largest makers of military technology.
The Chinese government has set goals to overtake the United States as the world’s leader in A.I. technology by 2030. The focus on A.I. has increased across the parts of the Chinese government that specialize in national security, including the spy agency that recruited Ms. Huang.
China’s M.S.S. spy agency was once a backwater. But when Xi Jinping took over as China’s leader in 2012, he began to invest in the agency. Today it is many times larger than the C.I.A., collecting human intelligence and intercepting electronic communications. The agency also conducts counterintelligence operations.
Peter Mattis, a former C.I.A. counterintelligence analyst, said China’s spy agency had made technology a focus of its activities, seeing it as “the key fight for dominance in the economic world.”
“They’re interested in what’s taking place in technology, in the technical specifications of what’s being built and in shaping decision-making as it relates to those things,” said Mr. Mattis, who is now the president of the Jamestown Foundation, a national security think tank. “Jensen is someone you’d want to influence because he wields a lot of power and is at the crux of a world-shaping technology.”
John Rizzo, a Nvidia spokesman, said that the company does not share classified information with its customers, and that customers do not ask Nvidia to press the U.S. government to change its policies on chip sales to China.
He added that the Chinese government had “consistently promoted its own domestic alternatives in China, including Huawei, and strictly limited imports of our data center products.”
Mr. Rizzo has maintained that Mr. Huang’s interactions with Ms. Huang were “not unusual” and consistent with the kinds of meetings he has with any of Nvidia’s many customers.
Liu Chang, a spokesman for the Chinese embassy, said The Times reporting was “unsubstantiated” and “nothing but smears against China.” Ms. Huang has not responded to multiple attempts to reach her for comment in recent days. Mr. Rizzo previously said that Mr. Huang’s interactions with Ms. Huang were “not unusual,” and that he speaks annually with thousands of executives who do business with Nvidia.
Spokeswomen for the White House and C.I.A. declined to comment.
Mr. Huang has been steadfast over the past several years in calling for the U.S. government to permit chip makers to sell A.I. technology to China. He has argued that doing so would create competition for Huawei, China’s tech giant, and slow its development of A.I. technology.
In 2025, he persuaded Mr. Trump to roll back a prohibition on A.I. chip sales to China and allow Nvidia to sell a less powerful chip there. He and the president later struck a deal to sell the company’s second-most-powerful chip to China, with the United States taking a 25 percent cut of sales. Mr. Trump later considered allowing Nvidia to sell China its latest chip, known as Blackwell. But he has backed off that idea.
Speaking at an investor conference in May, Mr. Huang said that China should not have access to Nvidia’s best technology, like its Blackwell chips or its forthcoming Rubin chip. He said the United States should have “the first, the most and the best, but simultaneously all American companies should compete globally.”
Founded in 1983, China’s M.S.S. spy agency long failed to win the confidence of the country’s leaders. The espionage and cyber-hacking arms of the People’s Liberation Army were for years considered the primary intelligence collection arms of Beijing.
The agency took on more of China’s espionage work after Beijing and Washington struck a deal in 2015 to curb cyberoperations, according to researchers and U.S. officials. In the years that followed, the Justice Department accused hackers associated with the M.S.S. of attempting to steal U.S. technology and infiltrate U.S. networks.
By 2023, the agency had emerged as a rival to the C.I.A., and began using A.I. to select and profile targets. It had expanded its network of spies through aggressive recruitment, and used its bigger budget to help Mr. Xi in his ambitions to challenge U.S. dominance.
The M.S.S. also used its ties to various Chinese companies to expand its work, in cyber-hacking, espionage and information operations. It is estimated to have hundreds of thousands of agents, which dwarfs the number of counterintelligence officers in the United States.
The agency continues to largely operate behind the scenes, but under its current leader, Chen Yixin, it has also taken on a more public role in Chinese life. In 2023, the agency created a WeChat account, mainly for domestic propaganda and for encouraging Chinese citizens to report people suspected of being foreign spies. The channel is also used to attack the United States for a supposed Cold War mind-set.
Mr. Chen is very familiar with the region of eastern China where Ms. Huang operates. A Zhejiang native, he spent a major part of his long career working for the province’s Chinese Communist Party. He served under Mr. Xi when Mr. Xi ran Zhejiang in the early 2000s. Political analysts say their ties are close.
Mr. Chen has been outspoken about the risks A.I. poses to the Chinese Communist Party. In a September essay in the state-run magazine China Cyberspace, he said that China needed to assert control over A.I. to protect political stability at home, defend against increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks and compete militarily with the United States. He said algorithms would help countries “gain the initiative on the battlefield.”
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