NYT: Jensen Huang was a Chinese spy target; the Post’s own check of the alleged spy’s résumé found nothing

Full analysis

What happened Why it matters How each country tells it Where accounts conflict Room for disagreement Our assessment Sources and evidence

What happened

The story broke on Thursday, October 29, when The New York Times published an investigation—Corriere della Sera counts six bylines—reporting that US intelligence agencies believe Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le, a Chinese national and senior executive at the Singapore data-center firm Megaspeed, worked for Chinese intelligence and passed information to Beijing. Every outlet in the pool relays that single investigation; none carried its own intelligence reporting. The Times wrote that Huang cultivated a close relationship with Jensen Huang, chief executive of Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company—Corriere puts its value at $5.2 trillion, twice Italy’s GDP—while, the New York Post notes, admitting it could not establish how close the relationship was.

Photographs on LinkedIn showed the two drinking whiskey at a technology gathering in Taipei in June 2024; Corriere and Hindustan Times both report the pair were seen again outside a Taipei restaurant after a business dinner in May 2025, Jensen stopping to speak with journalists.

The political dimension is what Corriere puts in its headline: Trump knew. Through people familiar with the matter, the Times reported President Trump was briefed on the intelligence roughly a year ago, chose not to act, and never had Jensen Huang given a defensive briefing—the formal warning the United States uses to tell someone they are a suspected intelligence target. Hindustan Times adds that officials initially believed the Nvidia chief was unaware Huang was gathering intelligence, but that some senior Trump officials have since questioned whether he could have remained ignorant.

Nvidia’s answer is on the record, from spokesperson John Rizzo: "Jensen’s interactions with Ms. Huang are not unusual or unexpected. Meetings with customers are part of a CEO’s job; Jensen talks with thousands of customer executives every year." Rizzo added that customers like Megaspeed receive routine business information rather than company secrets, and that Nvidia was confident Washington would alert it if someone posed a threat.

The chips are the hard, documentary half. The Times, citing ImportGenius trade records, reported Megaspeed’s Malaysian sister company bought at least $4.8 billion of AI equipment containing Nvidia chips between June 2024 and February 2026; Corriere rounds the figure to about $5 billion. US authorities have been investigating since late 2024, after a Commerce Department official found Nvidia equipment still packed in boxes during a visit to a Megaspeed data center in Malaysia. Singaporean authorities questioned Alice Huang in 2025 and released her without charge; the US file was transferred to the Justice Department this year. Bloomberg, cited by the Post, reported Megaspeed imported about 136,000 Nvidia GPUs through November 2025, while Nvidia’s own inspectors found only a few thousand of its newest chips at the company’s data center.

The only outlet to do original reporting is the New York Post, and what it found sits awkwardly against the profile. A Chinese private-fund database, Simuwang, lists a smiling Huang Le as fund manager and executive director of Shanghai Hexi Investment Management, with a résumé spanning Hunan TV, CCTV, HSBC’s private-banking division and CITIC Securities. The Post called Hunan TV: "I have not heard of her," an executive said. It found no reporting profile under Huang Le on Hunan TV’s or CCTV’s websites. HSBC and CITIC Securities did not respond.

Beijing’s response is the loudest denial. Embassy spokesperson Liu Chang told the Post: "China opposes vilifying Chinese citizens by peddling the so-called ‘Chinese spy’ narrative," and Hindustan Times quotes the same official calling the claims "groundless smears and slanders." RIA Novosti, reporting a statement the diplomatic mission gave it, says the embassy demanded Washington stop slandering Beijing and instead promote scientific cooperation.

Why it matters

At stake is the most valuable company in the world and the enforcement of the US ban on advanced AI chips to China. Nvidia makes the processors at the core of artificial intelligence, and Washington has restricted their export to China since 2022. Megaspeed, incorporated in Singapore, was not Chinese, and so could buy the latest chips; the question US investigators are asking is whether its data centers routed more of them to China than the paperwork shows. If any part of the $4.8 billion in equipment was diverted, that is the loophole story of the year in export control.

Corriere della Sera reads it as a governance failure in Washington—the president informed, the CEO unwarned—and times the publication against the APEC summit in China, where Trump will meet Xi Jinping for the third time in six months. The Italian daily notes the White House has stayed silent. Hindustan Times treats it as supply-chain politics with no domestic scandal: Jensen Huang lobbied Washington to ease chip sales to China, Trump approved older-generation sales last year for a share of revenue, and the relationship between the president and the CEO, the Times reported, "complicated efforts to tighten export controls," with some investigations reportedly stalled inside the Commerce Department.

RIA Novosti inverts the story entirely: its headline is the embassy’s demand that Washington stop slandering Beijing, and the espionage report appears only as an accusation to be rebutted. The Post sells the affair as celebrity-adjacent scandal—the résumé, the glamour, the whiskey photograph. Storm Media’s morning briefing slots the spy claim alongside US-Japan missile production and an Alphabet share decline, one move on a geopolitical ledger rather than a story of its own.

How each country tells it

• 🇺🇸
  New York Post · United States · original reporting

  Treats the affair as a personality scandal, excavating Alice Huang’s ‘high-flying’ TV-banking-fund résumé and the glamour of her reported closeness to Jensen Huang rather than the intelligence finding itself.
• 🇷🇺
  RIA Novosti · Russia · original reporting

  The only selected source that leads with the accused side’s rebuttal — the Chinese Embassy’s demand that Washington stop ‘slandering’ Beijing — treating the espionage report as an American fabrication rather than an intelligence finding.
• 🇮🇹
  Corriere della Sera · Italy · carries The New York Times

  Frames it as US political accountability, printing ‘(and Trump knew)’ in the headline: the news is that the president was informed a year ago and the warning never reached the CEO.
• 🇹🇼
  Storm Media · Taiwan · carries The New York Times

  Carries the spy claim as one item in a daily international briefing alongside US-Japan AMRAAM co-production and an Alphabet share rout — espionage as one move on a geopolitical ledger rather than a discrete scandal.
• 🇮🇳
  Hindustan Times · India · carries The New York Times

  A straight, heavily hedged news rewrite framed as a ‘Report’, treating the story as external great-power AI-supply-chain politics with no domestic scandal and no political blame.

Where accounts conflict

Two sets of facts here cannot all be true. The first is the core allegation: the Times reports, on the strength of unnamed intelligence sources, that Alice Huang spied for Beijing. Beijing’s embassy calls that "groundless smears and slanders." Nvidia’s spokesperson says the meetings themselves were ordinary. The Times has published no named official, no charge and no document; Singapore questioned Huang and released her without charge. The allegation is asserted, denied, and unproven.

The second is the biography. The espionage profile leans on Huang being a high-flying figure whose career spanned state television, global banking and securities. The New York Post is the only outlet that checked: a Hunan TV executive had never heard of her, and the broadcaster’s website—like CCTV’s—carries no trace of a reporter named Huang Le. That does not prove she did not work there; it proves the résumé, as it stands, rests on a self-published profile no newsroom could confirm.

Room for disagreement

The strongest case against reading this as a proven spy story is built from the reporting itself. Nvidia flatly denies anything unusual, on the record. The Times admits it could not establish how close the relationship was. Singapore released Huang without charge, and no agency has spoken publicly. The only independent check of her biography found it thinner than the profile suggests. On that record, a reasonable reading is that this remains an allegation by unnamed sources inside an investigation the US government has declined to confirm—no more, yet.