Jensen Huang is to step down as CEO of Nvidia after bombshell revelations that he had an affair with a businesswoman accused of being a Chinese spy.
Huang’s exit plunges a $4 trillion company into uncertainty and threatens to disrupt a complex AI ecosystem that has long relied on the world’s most valuable company to scale.
At the eye of the storm is Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le, who US intelligence officials believe was funnelling information to Beijing as she courted Nvidia’s CEO.
China denies allegations of corporate espionage as a “smear campaign”. But Washington is rattled, having spent years trying to keep Beijing from the secrets to rival its hold on cutting-edge AI technology.
The Nvidia spy scandal is only the latest in a long-running saga of alleged “honeytrap” plots, whereby rival states exploit “vulnerabilities” like sexual relationships for strategic gain.
Jensen Huang: Tech guru undone by suspected chip plot
Taiwanese-American engineer Jen-Hsun "Jensen" Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and oversaw its growth from making graphics processing units (GPUs) with $40,000 in the bank to the world’s most valuable tech company since 2025.
For years, Nvidia was best known to gamers chasing top-tier graphics. But its chips’ ability to perform many calculations at once has made them the oil of the AI boom and a strategic prize in the US-China race to dominate the technology.
And then, late last year, US authorities began investigating Nvidia client Megaspeed over suspicions that it was helping divert advanced AI chips to China. According to The New York Times, officials suspected that former managing director Alice Huang, who is not related to Jensen, was feeding information directly to Beijing on how to gain access to the chips.
Earlier this month, Nvidia’s board launched a probe into whether Jensen Huang had been targeted by a foreign intelligence operation. It also expressed confidence in him at the time. But scrutiny of his conduct has intensified in recent days after reports said the 63-year-old, who is married, had had an affair with Alice.
Mata Hari: The Dutch dancer turned wartime spy
Mata Hari was a Dutch exotic dancer executed by France for allegedly spying for Germany in October 1917.
Born in the Netherlands in 1876, Margaretha Geertruida Zelle would go on to earn a reputation as one of the most dangerous female spies of the First World War.
When her first marriage ended in 1902, she moved to Paris and became an exotic oriental dancer. In the years that followed, she began working as a courtesan. And by the outbreak of war in 1914, she found herself in Berlin, considered a French citizen, and at the mercy of the German state.
Mata Hari was detained by the British in 1915 while trying to move across borders.
The French eventually charged her with spying for Germany after intercepting telegrams that suggested the German military attaché in Spain was wiring her money. They said that she was being paid for secrets obtained by seducing prominent French officers and political figures.
The prosecution claimed during her trial that she had discovered and betrayed information about British tanks, before they saw use at the Somme. Britain was not told about the decision to execute her and only learned about it in the press.
John Vassall: Civil servant entrapped by the KGB
John Vassall was a British civil servant charged with espionage in 1962, at the height of the Cold War.
Vassall had been posted to the British embassy in Moscow in 1954, serving as a clerk to the naval attaché. It was while there that he fell victim to a Soviet honeytrap plot.
The naval clerk, then aged 30, was plied with alcohol and photographed having sex with other men after he was befriended by a Soviet agent working inside the diplomatic mission. He was blackmailed by the KGB because of his sexuality, then illegal in the UK and the USSR, and obliged to spy for them for seven years.
In return for regular payments, Vassall passed a succession of classified papers to his KGB handlers after he returned to London, including details of British torpedoes and anti-submarine devices, until he was finally arrested at his Westminster flat in September 1962.
Vassall, who insisted he had no Communist sympathies, told Special Branch that he regretted his actions but insisted he had been trying to avert conflict between the West and the Soviet bloc.
The present: British spies still ‘targeted by China’
State-level espionage continues to make headlines today. The i reported in 2024 that British intelligence officers were being targeted by Chinese spies in “honeytrap plots”.
Six UK intelligence sources told the newspaper that the Chinese state was increasingly using seduction and blackmail to uncover sensitive information spanning intelligence, politics and business.
One described being targeted via LinkedIn, while others described supposedly “chance” in-person meetings with people suspected of working for Beijing.
The sources pointed to several encounters in recent years, dating back to at least 2015, in which suspected spies had tried to befriend and seduce officials in order, they believe, to get them to share information.
Earlier this year, the author of a Home Office-sponsored report on the Chinese state said he too had been the victim of what he believes were attempted honeytraps.
During his research, he was contacted and asked for a meeting with a former Chinese citizen. He said no but began receiving connection requests on social media from women with empty profiles trying to contact him.
“They haven’t posted anything; there was no detail. It was just a photograph of a very, very beautiful woman. Before I started, I’d been on LinkedIn for 10 years. No one ever contacted me,” he told The Guardian.
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