The bombshell news coming out of this weekend is, of course, that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was having a years-long affair with an alleged Chinese spy and businesswoman named Alice Huang. Nvidia is the largest chipmaker in the United States, manufacturing the hardware that is the foundation of AI’s calculations.
Megaspeed, the company that Alice worked for, is the largest chipbuyer in Southeast Asia. And while Nvidia consistently told the U.S. government that Megaspeed had no connections to China or any Chinese shareholders—assuring that Nvidia was compliant with 2025 U.S.-China semiconductor export restrictions, and even shooing off Commerce Department investigators trying to ensure compliance—there were paper trails of Megaspeed’s entanglement with China, detailed in this report from a short-seller called Culper Research.
Culper reported that Megaspeed’s balance sheet from 2023 to 2024 exploded from $33 million to $3 billion in total liabilities and equity, driven almost entirely by $2.9 billion in refundable deposits received from an unnamed source. That money was then forwarded to subsidiaries, including Malaysia-based Speedmatrix, which pledged its entire business as collateral to Apex Enterprise Solutions. And who was Apex’s corporate parent? China’s equivalent of Amazon, Alibaba.
And just today, The Information put out a piece reporting that Alice’s real company, Shanghai Century Litong, enabled at least $7.5 billion Nvidia chips sales to China starting in 2023. Alice reportedly moved 240,000 banned chips from Nvidia when they were stuck in the supply chain.
Despite all the panic about China “winning” the AI race, the simple sex appeal of a female spy seems to have escaped all the wonky predictions and contingency plans to prevent China’s models (ha…) from dominating those in the United States. Sam Altman saying he was “worried” about the U.S. underestimating China in August of 2025 actually sounds a bit silly.
There are two groups that did know about Jensen’s escapades for some time, though. Those include the PR firm that Jensen hired a year ago to preemptively manage the inevitable fall-out, as well as, bizarrely, the White House. The White House has known about Alice since October 2025, which is also around the time that Nvidia donated $25 million to Donald Trump’s gilded ballroom construction. Naturally, the White House decided to do nothing with the information about Jensen. In fact, Jensen was invited to China for a tech summit with Xi Jinping as recently as May 2026.
It’s amusing to me that amid sexual harassment and corporate espionage trainings galore for rank-and-file workers of tech companies, the real culprit of China’s advancements and the stock market plunge may be the fallibility of one man whose power was too centralized, and whose fallibility was underestimated.
We’ll see what happens to Jensen’s tenure; the person with the final say on his conduct is the lawyer who mounted Elizabeth Holmes’s fraud defense before he realized she couldn’t pay her legal bills.
I do wonder how much training goes into warning mid-level AI engineers that attractive women making overtures to them are not likely to be interested in them for their dashing looks or charming personality. There are probably millions of dollars spent surveilling employees to ensure they’re not sharing confidential or proprietary information, and millions more put towards nebulous workplace and cybersecurity consultants. The average Nvidia employee is probably scared to death of making one phishing misstep, or of violating their lifetime non-disclosure agreements by uttering a word about their work.
Because wouldn’t those people be the target we all might suspect? Wouldn’t we assume that a leak to China might come from the unwitting Bay Area engineer who is lacking feminine or sexual energy in his life? (I do remember that during the infamous 2015 Las Vegas summit, while I briefly worked for Uber, the lore was that a sex worker lured a software engineer and stole his company laptop.)
So yes, the inexperienced AI engineer getting seduced by a double-agent seems like more a logical conclusion, at face value. As labor reporter for the New York Times Noam Scheiber writes on X: “Why not keep the focus on more obscure Nvidia officials who draw a lot less attention? It’s odd.”
I think this actually misses the point, though. Visionary powerful men, for the same reasons that they crave investment to build and power, are also susceptible to desiring further conquest. Especially the conquest of an attractive woman.
While Alice of course subverted that dynamic by ultimately making Jensen her conquest, the titillation of flirtation and the desire to spend time with a young woman likely appealed to his desire for private flattery and attention, which is a need that many powerful men have beyond public adulation (we literally have video footage of Jensen signing a woman’s chest.) Nvidia was something Jensen was already dominating, and Alice was something novel, shiny, and new.
For anyone who has lived life in the body of a moderately attractive woman, or anyone who has studied history or the humanities, what I’ve described above is not totally shocking. Over the last few weeks, we’ve seen these seemingly all-powerful men try and fail to control elections and evade accountability. But at the end of the day, there is no amount of money or high-tech that can cancel out the realities and messiness of human nature.
What else we’re paying attention to…
Anthropic, despite warnings of AI-fueled catastrophe, has filed for IPO.
A new report from the Coalition of Independent Technology Researchers found that 72% of leading AI researchers say a lack of transparency from AI developers is a major barrier to their research—harming their ability to research misinformation and disinformation.
In David Ellison’s first earnings call as CEO of Paramount and Warner Bros., Ellison dismissed “AI slop” and reiterated that the enterprise would “embrace” AI and tech-forward strategies.
Tech workers are flocking to New York City.
A New Jersey group representing more than 100,000 public sector workers in the state is calling for New Jersey to divest the more than $138 million it has in Palantir stock.
Patriots owner and billionaire Robert Kraft apparently didn’t get the memo, and wants to build a 900-megawatt data center campus in Worcester, Massachusetts.