Jensen Huang’s dealings with China and views on U.S. export controls on advanced AI chips are under fresh scrutiny after the Nvidia CEO confessed to an affair with a woman U.S. intelligence agencies reportedly believe to be working as a spy for China. The U.S. has spent years restricting the sale of advanced Nvidia chips to China on national security grounds.
In an interview Fortune conducted before the allegations surfaced, Huang said that he thought the chipmaker “could be of great service” to China. He also said that Nvidia had a “large and growing” opportunity in China.
Huang spoke to Fortune in mid-October, before The New York Times first reported later that month that U.S. officials had concluded the woman, Alice Huang—who has no relation to the Nvidia CEO—was a Chinese intelligence asset. It isn’t clear how long the relationship lasted, but photos shared online show the two together in Taipei as early as June 2024.
Asked in October whether he expected sales in China to pick up, Huang said there would be a “natural tension” between Washington and Beijing that “lasts a long time,” adding that Nvidia would continue to give shareholders no guidance on its China sales. The company has left China out of its revenue forecasts since August 2025, citing regulatory uncertainty in both countries. The U.S. has not allowed Nvidia to sell its most advanced AI chips to China, but has granted the company export licenses for older models of its graphics processing units (GPUs), the specialized chips that run AI and computer graphics applications. It has allowed Nvidia to market specialized versions of its GPUs in China that have been designed specifically for that market and which are engineered to be less capable at training frontier AI models. Beijing, for its part, has officially tried to bar the country’s major tech companies from buying Nvidia’s chips as part of an effort to spur demand for domestic alternatives.
Nonetheless, Huang told Fortune he saw promise in the Chinese market. “I think the opportunity in China is large and growing, just like the AI market across the world is large and growing,” Huang said. “We could be of great service to the local market. We can compete and win as much of the AI market as possible for the United States, while also providing compute resources, which is really important to their economy.”
China has been a long-running headache for Nvidia. Back in 2022, the Biden administration imposed export controls that barred Nvidia from selling its most advanced AI chips to China, aiming to slow Beijing’s progress in AI and its potential military applications. Nvidia designed scaled-down chips for the Chinese market, but successive rule changes cut many of those off too.
Since then, Huang has continually pushed for more access to the Chinese market. In October 2025, after export controls and Beijing’s pushback had shut Nvidia out of the market, he complained that the company had gone from 95% market share in China to 0%.
In December 2025, President Trump reversed course on some of the Biden-era restrictions, allowing Nvidia to ship its H200 chips—which are designed to comply with U.S. export controls—to approved Chinese customers, with the U.S. government taking a 25% cut. The decision came after months of lobbying by Huang, who met with Trump to discuss export controls days before the announcement. Nvidia’s complicated history with China has been dragged back into the spotlight by Huang’s confession to the extra-marital affair. In Sunday’s memo to staff reviewed by Fortune, he admitted he had been “unfaithful” to his wife, after the Financial Times reported on a U.S. government memo describing a romantic relationship between him and Alice Huang. “There is no excuse for what I did,” he wrote in the memo. “I am deeply sorry.”
The same day, Nvidia’s board announced that a committee of independent directors, assisted by outside counsel, would examine whether company secrets or national security had been compromised. The board said it so far had “no reason to believe” either had been. For now, Huang remains CEO and said he would cooperate fully with the review.
U.S. officials reportedly believe Alice Huang was working for China’s Ministry of State Security. Megaspeed, a Singapore-based data center operator where she was an executive, has become one of Nvidia’s largest customers over the past two years. Its Malaysian affiliate bought at least $4.8 billion in equipment containing Nvidia chips between June 2024 and February 2026, according to the Times. U.S. officials have scrutinized the company since 2024 over suspicions it helped Chinese firms evade export controls. It is suspected that, despite U.S. export controls, the leading Chinese AI companies have access to large computing clusters of Nvidia’s advanced GPUs, obtained either through large-scale smuggling operations, or through data centers in other Asian nations that they have accessed using front companies.
Nvidia has previously told news outlets that Huang’s dealings with Alice Huang were routine, and a company spokesperson told Fortune: “Today’s news will not slow NVIDIA. Jensen is committed to continuing to lead NVIDIA as CEO without interruption.”
Megaspeed also did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment, and Alice Huang could not be reached. China’s foreign ministry called the allegations “pure groundless speculation and slander.”
The Republican chairs of three House committees have asked Huang to attend a private briefing the day after Nvidia reports quarterly earnings next week. Lawmakers are likely to press Huang on whether his push into China has put U.S. interests at risk.
In October, he told Fortune that Nvidia could put American customers first and still compete abroad.
“The United States recognizes that because the technology is invented in the United States, and we’re an American company, we should provide, and we do provide, the best, the soonest and the most to American companies. However, we should compete,” Huang told Fortune during the interview. “AI is a five-layer cake, and America should go compete at every single layer, not just the model layer.”
The post Before news broke of his affair with a suspected Chinese spy, Nvidia’s Huang told Fortune his company “could be of great service” to China appeared first on Fortune.
