Nvidia opens investigation into CEO's relationship with alleged Chinese spy

NVIDIA says it is opening an investigation into its CEO, Jensen Huang. He admitted to having an affair with a woman suspected of being a Chinese spy. Huang is now facing questions about whether he's become caught up in a foreign intelligence honey trap. NVIDIA's computer chips are in large part fueling the global AI race, and there are major concerns the illicit relationship may have helped steer advanced NVIDIA's chips to China. Yesterday, U.S. President Donald Trump said he stands by Huang. So NVIDIA's shares are sliding this morning. The chip giant is on track to lose more than $200 billion in market value. And my next guest was part of the team that broke the story of Huang's relationship last month. Julian E. Barnes is a national security and intelligence reporter from the New York Times. He joins us this morning from Washington. Thank you so much for being with us today. Thanks for having me. Okay, so we see that NVIDIA is launching an independent investigation into its CEO. Why now? Well, we reported last month that Jensen Wong had a close relationship with a woman who was a Chinese intelligence asset. We followed that up with more reporting in the last few days that. But... Alice Wong was a spy for China's Ministry of State Security, their leading intelligence agency, as well as Rubio, Marco Rubio, the national security advisor, circulating a memo last spring to senior people about this troubling relationship. We had previously reported that President Trump had been briefed about it. So, The continued reporting by The New York Times and other publications has pushed NVIDIA to investigate and push Jensen Huang to admit to the affair. So now, what else can you also tell us about the woman who goes by Alice Wang that Jensen admitted he had this close relationship with? So she was a top executive at a company called Megaspeed. Megaspeed was building data centers in Southeast Asia. NVIDIA was saying that Megaspeed was a client. This was an ordinary business relationship. Relationship, but. Megaspeed was providing the cloud services it developed to Alibaba and other Chinese companies, and U.S. officials believe that to a certain extent, Megaspeed was funneling compute to China. China did not have access to NVIDIA's best chips. They're banned under export controls. The top NVIDIA chips cannot be sold to China. but getting Computing power, cloud power through companies like Megaspeed is is a way for Chinese companies to get access to the best chips. a I You know, you touched on this in your first answer there know, that you reported that the U.S. Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, oversaw the drafting of this highly classified memo this past spring, I warning that Trump administration officials, know. that NVIDIA's chief executive, might be entangled with Alice Wang. You know, when we're talking about the investigation that's followed from the company, what took so long with that, given that this information was out there, and how significant is that in hindsight now? Yeah, look, the New York Times reporters, Anna Swanson and her team reported more than a year ago about the relationship between Alice Wong. Thank you. She and the team reported about the use of Megaspeed's cloud data by Chinese companies. So this has been on. The U.S. government radar for a long time, this has been on NVIDIA's radar for a long time. But clearly, Jensen Wong exerts a lot of power over NVIDIA, and he did not want this investigation. The NVIDIA board only in the last few days, last few hours, relented to bring about this investigation. We also now have congressional investigations, congressional Republicans. Summoned Mr. Wong to Capitol Hill to testify about his relationship and the potential leak of information through Alice Wong. You know, when we take a look at the stock market, which we referenced right off the top there, you know, losing so much in stock market value. What might that what impact might that have on his future as CEO? Well, look, the importance of NVIDIA to the U.S. stock market is part of the reason that Donald Trump has been relatively unconcerned about these allegations until now. He has a close relationship with Jensen Wang. I don't want to go too long. But it's important to remember that despite the stock slide, Jensen Wong remains very, very important to NVIDIA. We will see how these investigations, both the internal one and the congressional one, go. But we certainly cannot expect Jensen Wong necessarily to be ousted from this. There's a long way to go on this story. You know, finally, Julian, I want to ask you, you've done, you and your team have done so much work on this. When you take a look at the story, I mean, you're talking about a highly intelligent CEO knowing the highly sensitive security value of what it is that he's working with. How does this happen? I mean, it's a great question. There are very few American companies that are sort of more important to the race to AI than NVIDIA. NVIDIA is one of America's most important companies. Thank It should come to no one's surprise that the thinking of Jensen Wang, you so the plans of NVIDIA, the policy that NVIDIA is advocating for would much be of incredible interest and importance to for the Chinese Communist Party. And so. joining In some ways, it's very hard to see how a person like Jensen Wong would put himself in this situation. us. Thank you very much. But it's also hard to speculate exactly what goes through the minds of any middle-aged CEO. Very interesting case. We appreciate your reporting and you sharing it with our viewers today. Thanks so much for joining us, Julian. Thank you. Julian E. Barnes is a national security and intelligence reporter for The New York Times. He joined us today from Washington. Thank you again. Thanks.