Sam Sifton, The New York Times; The A.I. Spy Thriller
"The stakes
There’s more to all this than romantic scandal and corporate espionage. The United States and China are in a race to control the future of artificial intelligence. Nvidia makes the chips that have for now put the United States ahead. To keep it that way, Washington bars Nvidia from selling chips to China.
Enter Alice Huang, a Chinese citizen who is an executive at a Singapore-based data-center company called Megaspeed. It’s unclear when she first met Huang from Nvidia, but in 2024 they were photographed together at a bar in Taipei as Megaspeed prepared to spend $2 billion on Nvidia chips. Investigators from the U.S. Commerce Department were interested in that: Was Megaspeed helping China sidestep American export restrictions? Whom did she really work for? (Alice Huang has not responded to multiple attempts to reach her for comment in recent days.)
U.S. officials concluded she was recruited by China’s Ministry of State Security to gather information on the American C.E.O. and potentially to influence his company to funnel chips to China. That’s not how America wins the global competition for dominance of A.I...
There could be political fallout as well. Huang is a close ally of President Trump. He is also friendly with the Chinese, whom he told Bloomberg are “not our enemies.” Last year, he persuaded the president to roll back some of the ban on chip sales to China, after which Nvidia sold its second-most valuable chip there. (The U.S. government took a 25 percent cut of the sales.) And Nvidia has given at least $20 million to Trump’s ballroom fund."
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