US President Donald Trump has said the FBI is investigating the affair between Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang and an alleged Chinese spy — and that he put the question to Huang himself.
This site reported yesterday that Nvidia's board had commissioned an independent investigation and that Huang had admitted the affair. What is new today is that a federal law-enforcement agency is involved, and that the US president has spoken to him about it.
What Trump said he asked
Trump told reporters he spoke to Huang on Monday, following reports that American officials believed he had been targeted in a Chinese espionage campaign.
"I asked him that question, 'Did you have any idea she was a spy?' He said 'I had no idea she was a spy' and I really believe him," Trump said.
He later told reporters at the White House that the FBI was looking into the issue, without elaborating on the investigation or saying when it began. The FBI declined to comment when contacted by the BBC.
The detail that changes the timeline
According to the New York Times, Secretary of State Marco Rubio sent a memo to senior officials in Washington last spring, warning that the Nvidia boss was in a close relationship with a Chinese spy.
That is the most consequential line in the story, and it is easy to skim past. It means the concern inside the US government is not days old but months old, and it was circulating at cabinet level while Nvidia's chips remained the central instrument of American export policy towards China.
US intelligence officials believe Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le and no relation to Jensen Huang, was working for Beijing. She was managing director of the Singaporean company Megaspeed, which has had dealings with Nvidia.
What each side is now saying
Beijing has rejected the claims. Its foreign ministry called the allegations "entirely groundless, speculative and intended to smear and malign China".
Nvidia has repeated its position that it sees no sign of either company secrets or national security being affected. Trump's remarks are the first public indication of whether Huang knew about the woman's alleged ties.
Megaspeed's office in Singapore's central business district appeared operational and staffed on Tuesday. The BBC was refused entry to its floor; a staff member reached by phone declined to comment and referred queries to the company's PR team.
Why the market reacted the way it did
Nvidia is the world's second most valuable company after Apple, and it designs the chips that most of the current AI buildout runs on. The revelations knocked about $250bn off its value on Monday as the share price fell more than four per cent.
A quarter of a trillion dollars moving on news about one executive's private life is not really a judgement about that private life. It is the market pricing the possibility that the person who has run this company for three decades might not continue to, at a moment when nothing about the AI supply chain has a spare part.
For Bangladesh, the practical thread is unchanged and worth repeating: the export controls that govern whether these chips reach Asian buyers are set in Washington, and this story now sits inside that process rather than beside it.
