There’s a specific mantra drilled into government workers, 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 US Army’s Counterintelligence Command posted on Valentine’s Day: “It doesn’t take a mathematician to figure out ‘10 + 5 = honeytrap.’” The very beautiful woman who is suddenly interested in your very ordinary existence probably has ulterior motives, is the message.
Jensen Huang surely doesn’t live a typical life—he’s a centibillionaire, the swashbuckling CEO of Nvidia, one of the hottest and most geopolitically consequential companies of the 21st century. Surely he’s aware of the possibility that he’d cross paths with intelligence assets. In fact, it’s hard to think of many companies in the world that would be a higher priority target for foreign intelligence agencies.
All of that makes the stock-shaking news this week all the more surprising. How did Huang get embroiled in a spy scandal that mixes infidelity, international espionage, the Trump administration, and the economic behemoth of the multitrillion-dollar AI industry?
The story kicked off just before Halloween, with a six-byline story in The New York Times reporting that Huang was the target of a Chinese spy plot. Starting somewhere between 2024 and 2025, Huang allegedly had an affair with Alice Huang (no relation), a one-time executive at a Singapore-based cloud provider known as Megaspeed. US intelligence agencies warned top US 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 either national security or Nvidia secrets were compromised,” but that’s far from the only concern.
As one would expect, China has denied any nefarious plot centered on Jensen Huang. A Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson on Monday said, “The narrative about so-called Chinese spies is entirely based on groundless speculation—it’s nothing more than slander and smearing.”
But according to reporting by The New York Times and the Financial Times, US intelligence officials also claim that Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le, was reporting to China’s Ministry of State Security intelligence agency. On Monday, Megaspeed said on LinkedIn that US authorities found “no evidence of any violations concerning the illicit transfer of chips or any illegal activities.” (There’s no indication so far that Alice Huang, a one-time Chinese state journalist, is an employee or “officer” of Chinese intelligence; she’s believed to be an “asset,” an outsider who aids an intelligence agency, sometimes for pay, sometimes not.)
China, though, has elevated economic espionage to a core pillar of its economic and military development, stealing the designs for everything from US fighter jets to solar panels and commercial paint recipes. “Honeypots” or “honey traps”—positioning an alluring operative to seduce or develop a relationship with a key target—are one of intelligence’s most infamous and well-established strategies. French officials have warned specifically about Chinese honeypots since at least 2011, when intelligence reports cited a pharmaceutical researcher who was seduced and then blackmailed by a Chinese spy operation.
