China’s Ministry of State Security probably never approached Jensen Huang directly. According to a former U.S. counterintelligence analyst, it didn’t have to.
“It wasn’t the Ministry of State Security approaching Jensen Huang. It was approaching the people around [him],” Peter Mattis, president of the Jamestown Foundation, a former CIA counterintelligence analyst and co-author of Chinese Communist Espionage: An Intelligence Primer, told MBN. “And that’s much, much harder for people to detect unless they’ve already been sensitized to the issues.”
Huang resigned as chief executive of Nvidia Thursday after he admitted to an affair with Chinese national suspected of having ties to China’s main civilian intelligence agency. Colette Kress, Nvidia’s chief financial officer, will serve as interim CEO while the company searches for Huang’s replacement. Reports have also romantically linked him to two other affairs with Nvidia employees.
Nvidia is a key player in the AI industry. It controls an estimated 81% of the market for AI data center chips, according to research firm IDC, making its chips valuable global commodities.
The Commerce Department approved sales of up to 35,000 of Nvidia’s Blackwell chips each to the UAE’s G42 and Saudi Arabia’s Humain in November 2025, on the condition that both met strict requirements to keep the chips from falling into China’s hands.
The United States has banned direct sales of the most advanced chips to China since late 2022, but Chinese companies get around this restriction by renting from data centers in Southeast Asia, such as Singapore-based Megaspeed, where Alice Huang, the woman in question, was a senior executive. It is one of Nvidia’s largest customer in the region.
Jensen Huang (no relation), meanwhile, has been an influential advocate for easing the restrictions. In January, the administration approved sales of Nvidia’s H200 chips to China.
Nvidia shares fell almost 14% Thursday before recovering to a loss of 4.34% at market close. Investors bet the chipmaker’s turmoil would benefit its competitors, giving rivals AMD and Broadcom each almost a 6% bump.
Mattis said the reporting points to the ministry recruiting the woman — before or after she met Huang, or for an unrelated purpose such as chip smuggling — and then exploiting the opening.
If Beijing was targeting Huang, Mattis said, the goal was political, not technical. Nothing in a chip executive’s head is classified. What he had was a direct line to President Donald Trump.
“Anybody who has persistent contact, who can have a one-on-one with the president, who can call him, is somebody who’s going to possess information about the president’s thinking that is otherwise incredibly difficult to get,” he said.
China also likely sought some influence, especially over export controls, which have limited Beijing since arms embargoes were imposed following the 1989 Tiananmen massacre.
“These things have driven Beijing nuts,” Mattis said. Evading restrictions is difficult and expensive. “That’s a lot easier if you can just buy something … and do it directly without having to come up with a lot of workarounds.”
China has denied any allegations of spying.
U.S. intelligence reportedly officials kept Alice Huang under electronic surveillance for at least a year and briefed Trump on her relationship with Huang last year, according to The New York Times. Mattis called the delay a judgment call, not a lapse. Early concerns “probably don’t rise to the level of saying, ‘We need to brief the national security adviser, we need to brief the president,’” he said.
The FBI is investigating Jensen Huang’s affair, Trump said at a news conference on Nov. 9, adding that Huang “will be in good shape” following the investigation.
“I asked him that question, ‘Did you have any idea she was a spy?’” Trump said. “He said, ‘I had no idea she was a spy’ and I really believe him.”
Mattis was blunt that the operation’s exposure does not mean it had failed. “Just because it’s not going to be successful next week because of this doesn’t mean that it wasn’t successful last week or the month before or the year before,” he said. “In intelligence, almost all good things come to an end.”
The question is what Beijing got, Mattis said. Better access to chips? Heading off new export controls or being able to shape how the president understands the U.S.-China AI race? “Any of those things would be something that would make all of this worth it for them.”
Every AI executive, from chip designers to startup founders, should assume they are on Beijing’s list, Mattis said.
“It shouldn’t surprise someone like Jensen Huang that he would be targeted,” he said. “And it shouldn’t surprise anyone in the AI industry, in the C-suite of a company or the founder of a startup.”
“We may think the world is over there and not here,” he said. “But we might find ourselves targets regardless of what we want. We may find that geopolitics is, in fact, interested in us.”
