There is a specific mantra instilled in civil servants, military officers, and intelligence personnel during counterintelligence briefings: “If she’s a 10 and you’re a 5, she’s a spy!” Or, as the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Command posted on Valentine’s Day: “You don’t have to be a mathematician to understand ’10 + 5 = Honey Trap.’ The very beautiful woman who suddenly takes an interest in your very ordinary existence probably has ulterior motivesthat is the message.
Jensen Huang certainly doesn’t lead a typical life: he’s a billionaire, the swaggering CEO of Nvidia, one of the hottest and most geopolitically important companies of the 21st century. He is surely aware of the possibility of crossing paths with intelligence agents. In fact, it’s hard to imagine many companies around the world that would be a priority target for foreign intelligence agencies.
All of which makes this week’s shocking news even more surprising. How did Huang become embroiled in a spy scandal involving infidelity, international espionage, the Trump administration and the multibillion-dollar economic giant of the AI industry?
The story began just before Halloween, with a six-line article in the New York Times reporting that Huang was the target of a Chinese spy plot. Between 2024 and 2025, Huang allegedly had an affair with Alice Huang (no relation), a former executive at a Singapore-based cloud provider known as Megaspeed. U.S. intelligence agencies warned senior U.S. officials that they believed she was a Chinese intelligence asset. So far, Nvidia’s board, which has launched its own investigation, says it has “no reason to believe that national security or Nvidia’s secrets have been compromised,” but that’s far from the only concern.
Predictably, China has denied any nefarious plots centered on Jensen Huang. A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson said on Monday: “The narrative about so-called Chinese spies is entirely based on baseless speculation – it is nothing more than slander and defamation. »
But according to reports from the New York Times and the Financial Times, U.S. intelligence officials also say Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le, reported to China’s Ministry of State Security intelligence agency. On Monday, Megaspeed said on LinkedIn that U.S. authorities had found “no evidence of violations regarding the illicit transfer of chips or illegal activities.” (There is no indication so far that Alice Huang, a former Chinese state journalist, is an employee or “officer” of China’s intelligence services; she is considered an “asset,” a foreigner who helps an intelligence agency, sometimes for pay, sometimes not.)
China, however, has elevated economic espionage to a key pillar of its economic and military development, stealing designs for everything from American fighter jets to solar panels and commercial paint recipes. “Honey pots” or “honey traps” – positioning an attractive agent to seduce or develop a relationship with a key target – are one of intelligence’s most infamous and well-established strategies. French authorities have warned specifically about Chinese honeypots since at least 2011, when intelligence reports cited a pharmaceutical researcher who was lured and then blackmailed by a Chinese spy operation.
Gn bussni
