Jensen Huang, the head of Nvidia, was not an accidental target. Alice Huang, according to US intelligence assessments, works for the Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS) and was the chief executive of Singapore-based Megaspeed, a company that purchases advanced Nvidia chips. These chips power the global AI wave and are at the centre of US efforts to prevent that technology from reaching China.
Huang lobbied Trump for a relaxation of export bans. Chinese firms have been barred from directly purchasing advanced chips since 2022, but they are permitted to rent computing power in data centres in South-East Asia, such as those operated by Megaspeed. Trump is travelling to Shenzhen next week, where he is expected to extend the fragile trade truce with Xi, but he will not mention the affair there. The negotiations and the planned truce concern tariffs.
In January 2026, a jury in San Francisco convicted former Google engineer Linwei Ding on seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of trade secret theft. Ding removed more than 2,000 pages of documentation on Google’s TPU chips, GPU systems and network cards that link thousands of chips into a single supercomputer, while simultaneously secretly running his own AI company in China. It was the first conviction for economic espionage linked to artificial intelligence.
The Chinese group Salt Typhoon, which the US Department of the Treasury has linked to the MSS, hacked the networks of at least eight US telecom operators, including AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and Lumen. It gained access to systems through which US police and agencies wiretap suspects under court order, and the mobile phones of presidential candidates were also targeted. Other Chinese groups are accused of planting malicious code in power grids and water systems, to be used if necessary.
CIA Deputy Director Michael Ellis told the New York Times this year that China is a different opponent from previous ones because the “competition is economic”. The CIA has expanded data collection to private Chinese firms in artificial intelligence, semiconductors and biotechnology, and posts videos on social media to recruit dissatisfied Chinese officials. In 2025, Chinese police published the names of three alleged NSA agents, accusing them of attacks on the Asian Winter Games and Huawei, while the MSS accused the NSA on WeChat of hacking into the Chinese national time measurement centre. That same year, a Chinese regulator summoned Nvidia for talks over suspicions that its chips could be remotely tracked and disabled, while Beijing is pushing its firms towards domestic Huawei chips. Some analysts doubt how important Megaspeed is in the first place.
In 2001, a US reconnaissance aircraft collided with a Chinese fighter near Hainan. Between 2010 and 2012, China killed or imprisoned 18 to 20 CIA sources, and as recently as 2023, a Chinese balloon over the US froze relations for several months. In Belgium, Xu Yanjun, a senior MSS officer, was arrested while attempting to obtain secrets from a GE Aviation engineer. Xu Yanjun was the first Chinese intelligence officer extradited to the US and received a 20-year prison sentence; he was not seeking fighter jet plans but composite blades for civil aircraft engines, into which GE had invested more than five billion dollars. That same year, the US accused Chinese memory manufacturer Fujian Jinhua of stealing Micron’s DRAM secrets, but the firm was acquitted in 2024 due to a lack of evidence. Taiwanese television station CTI filmed Jensen and Alice Huang at the same table in a Taiwanese restaurant last year.
