Intelligence Scoop: How Nvidia’s CEO Fell for a Suspected Chinese Spy

Did the CEO of one of the world’s most valuable companies just get honeytrapped by a Chinese spy? And why did the White House know for a year, and do nothing? Listen as David and Gordon tell the inside story of whether the Nvidia CEO, Jenson Huang, was honeytrapped by a Chinese spy. ------------------- Sign-up for our free newsletter where producer Becki takes you behind the scenes of the show: therestisclassified.com/newsletter ------------------- Give The Declassified Club this Christmas. Treat yourself or a fellow fan to a membership: bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, newsletter, and more. Annual gifts come with a special edition T-shirt. ------------------- Get a 10% discount on business PCs, printers and accessories using the code TRIC10. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://HP.com/CLASSIFIED⁠⁠⁠⁠ for more information. T&C's apply. ------------------- Email: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@restisclassified⁠ Video Editor: Joe Pettit Social Producer: Emma Jackson Trainee Assistant Producer: Rachel White Producer: Becki Hills Head of History: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03David McCloskey?

  For exclusive interviews, bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, first look at live show tickets, a weekly newsletter, and discounted books, join the Declassified Club at therestisclassified.com.

• 0:25Gordon Corera?

  Did the CEO of one of the world's most valuable companies just get honey-trapped by a Chinese spy? And why did the White House know for a year and do nothing? Well, welcome to The Rest Is Classified. I'm Gordon Corera.

• 0:38David McCloskey?

  And I'm David McClosky.

• 0:39Gordon Corera?

  And David, this time, we're looking at what happens when the world's biggest spy agency targets the world's biggest tech CEO, in this case Jensen Wong, head of Nvidia. Now, it's a story about an apparent honey trap and influence operation caught by US intelligence, a secret memo drafted under the Secretary of State and the president who was warned and chose to look the other way.

• 1:03David McCloskey?

  Although, as we'll get to later, I think whether or not this was a honey trap is a very interesting question. It's one we'll be looking into. We'll also be explaining why Nvidia's chips are one of the most important intelligence targets on the planet and why this one operation is really just the tip of a much bigger iceberg, a sprawling Chinese effort to get hold of American AI chips and to influence policy through shell companies, empty offices, and data centers on Malaysian palm oil plantations. But first, a word from our sponsor, HP.

• 1:38Gordon Corera?

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• 1:41David McCloskey?

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• 2:27Gordon Corera?

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• 2:47David McCloskey?

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• 2:50Gordon Corera?

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• 3:48Speaker 02

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• 4:48Gordon Corera?

  So David, let's set the scene and maybe begin our story a few years back in the capital of Taiwan.

• 4:55David McCloskey?

  Well, it's June 2024, Gordon. It's a, it's a hot night in Taipei. It is the night of Computex. It's a big technology trade show. I have never been. It is just wrapped. Jensen Wong, who's the CEO of Nvidia, is there in his trademark black leather jacket. He comes into a bar that's got views over the city. He's with a few other Nvidia executives. There's a group of kind of AI company bosses and executives there. He drinks a whiskey, a shot, toasts the AI boom. And sitting next to him is a woman named Alice Wong. No relation. She is an executive at a Singapore-based data center

• 5:38David McCloskey?

  company called Megaspeed, which almost nobody in the industry has heard of at this point. But Megaspeed is about to buy roughly $2 billion of Nvidia's most advanced AI technology at that point. One of the executives who was at the bar that night will later tell The New York Times that just after midnight, Alice Wong had said to the group, "I bet you guys that I can get Jensen here." And then she messages Jensen, and then Jensen immediately shows up. And this seemingly innocuous scene in a Taipei bar is actually a really important set piece for the story to come.

• 6:17Gordon Corera?

  That's right, because according particularly to The New York Times reporting, which has come out in the last week or so, US intelligence agencies have concluded that Alice Wong was a Chinese intelligence asset working for the Ministry of State Security, the MSS, and she was funneling information to Beijing and had developed this relationship, which, it appears, was a romantic relationship with Jensen Wong. And I think this is why it's such a fascinating moment, because it gets to the heart of what modern espionage looks like and the extent to which tech companies are right at the heart of it and on the frontline.

• 6:59Gordon Corera?

  We did that story about OpenAI being spied on by the Saudis a few weeks ago, but this in many ways is even more significant because it gets to the heart of national security and government policy. So David, let's set up Jensen Wong and why Chinese intelligence would be so interested in him.

• 7:16David McCloskey?

  Yeah, so Jensen, born in Taipei in 1963, is sent to the US as a nine-year-old, ends up at a boarding school in Kentucky, then goes to Oregon State, where I believe he meets his, his future wife, Lori. Then he goes on to Stanford. He co-founds Nvidia in 1993 to make graphics chips for video games. So for most of its existence, Nvidia is a kind of, you know, somewhat obscure supplier of processors and chips into the video gaming industry.

• 7:51Gordon Corera?

  If that was all that they were useful for, then perhaps this wouldn't be such a big spy story. But it is the fact that it's discovered they're crucial and valuable and vital to AI, aren't they?

• 8:02David McCloskey?

  I mean, Gordon, you are the, you're the resident science explainer, but we're going to give you the day off here. Essentially, Nvidia's chips are designed to handle massive amounts of data all at once, and they become foundational to the AI boom. So ChatGPT launches in November of 2022. Suddenly, every company on earth who's involved in AI is scrambling to buy Nvidia chips. And the numbers are really crazy. I mean, The New York Times estimates that Nvidia's revenue growth, it basically had grown sevenfold over the past four years. Does roughly $115 billion in data center sales in 2024 alone. A year ago, it becomes the first company in history valued above $5 trillion.

• 8:45David McCloskey?

  So this is kind of essentially why the MSS, or frankly, probably any other foreign intelligence agency, would be very interested in Jensen Wong, is that he personally has become a kind of choke point in the AI race. And this is crucial because there's a technological kind of commercial piece to this through Nvidia. And then there's also, and we'll come to this, his political connections and influence over AI policymaking in Washington.

• 9:10Gordon Corera?

  I mean, the US and China are in a race over AI. I mean, the US Treasury Secretary said a couple of months ago, "If China wins, there'll be no tomorrow." You know, you hear this dramatic language, slightly over the top, which suggests whoever wins this AI race will have such economic power, such influence over national security, such influence over the world, that it will be transformational. And one of the crucial determining factors of who gets there first is who has the best chips. And the US does have a major advantage in that its companies and the ones of its allies are better at designing and building advanced chips than the Chinese. So Nvidia becomes a major part of the US edge

• 9:55Gordon Corera?

  over China in this AI race. And Nvidia has a kind of lock on it to some extent because it makes themselves four out of every five chips that go into the global data centers. And China, of course, is trying to catch up. It's trying to build its own chips, like it's through its company Huawei and others, but it's not easy, takes a lot of investment. And so in the meantime, one of the crucial ways of stopping China catching up for the US is to deny China access to the most advanced chips, including the Nvidia chips. So this has become a huge battle and a huge question, which is how much do you restrict American companies from selling advanced chips to China? What do you let them get hold of?

• 10:37Gordon Corera?

  Because obviously, the companies like Nvidia want to sell. They want to make money. But there's been kind of back and forth and lobbying over the extent of chip restrictions with Nvidia at the heart of it. And of course, Jensen Wong has been at the heart of this, and it's drawn him very much, hasn't it, into politics and into being a political player?

• 10:59David McCloskey?

  I found it fascinating to find that, I mean, really, prior to 2025,

• 11:06David McCloskey?

  Jensen Huang very rarely visited Washington and Nvidia spent very little money on lobbying, kind of stayed out of politics. But that really shifts over the course of 2025 and 2026. And Jensen Huang, as we'll discuss, I mean, he very much gets himself into Trump world, doesn't he? Which is a little bit, when you think about his background, it's a bit odd. He's kind of, it doesn't seem like a natural fit inside, you know, the world of Donald J. Trump, but he's, he really has ingratiated himself with the president.

• 11:36Gordon Corera?

  Yeah, it is interesting because he doesn't necessarily feel like an obvious fit, but I think he works out how to sell himself and his story, doesn't he? As an immigrant success story, as someone living the American dream, as someone delivering wealth and wealth creation, which kind of works with Trump. And he seems to cultivate, you know, Donald Trump very effectively and goes to Mar-a-Lago, gets in with the White House, and they build a close relationship, don't they?

• 12:04David McCloskey?

  Absolutely right. I mean, Nvidia has pledged $500 billion in US AI infrastructure as part of Trump's kind of domestic manufacturing drive. As you mentioned, Jensen Huang and his wife Lori have been guests at big donors dinners at Mar-a-Lago, kind of try to sell Trump personally on letting chip companies do business with Beijing. He seems to have really wowed the president. Trump seems personally kind of interested in Huang's kind of charisma. I think Steve Bannon at some point said, Trump loves killers and Jensen Huang is a killer, right? So he's kind of this commercial animal that, that Trump really, really respects.

• 12:48David McCloskey?

  I mean, Trump winds up inviting Jensen Huang on a state visit to the UK. October of last year, Trump publicly cites a phone call from Jensen Huang as a reason he stood down from sending ICE agents into San Francisco. Gives you a sense of the personal influence that Jensen Huang has with the president.

• 13:08Gordon Corera?

  Yeah, and he's clearly very good at building his brand. I mean, he's got his brand about his own leather jackets he'd seen everywhere. And he's also clearly very good at building personal relationships. I mean, he's been here to the UK a number of times. I mean, I was looking and he's met the king twice in the last year or so, including at Dumfries House for a kind of AI meeting back in September of this year. And there were moments at kind of conferences where Jensen is getting phone calls from Donald Trump while he's on stage at a conference and he puts Donald Trump on speakerphone so everyone can hear Trump talking about him. And it's obviously a kind of performative bit of theatrics they probably planned, but it emphasizes the extent to which he's built relationships. And also, as you said, built relationships with money as well as with his kind of personal brand and influence.

• 13:52David McCloskey?

  Yeah, I mean, because so Trump is an Nvidia investor, we should say, he's, he's invested in it. And, and I think Jensen Huang has become a kind of investor in Trump world. I mean, Huang has donated $20 million to the White House ballroom renovation. Nvidia has spent $20 billion investing in a startup that lives under the portfolio of 1789 Capital, which is Donald Trump Jr.'s investment firm. So there's not only the sort of personal chemistry between the two guys and respect, but there's, there are financial connections that are below the surface or really not so far below the surface.

• 14:29Gordon Corera?

  The size of Nvidia means it matters for the US economy, which also matters to Donald Trump, because it's driving that growth in the US stock market, along with other AI companies, which of course, you know, we might come back to this also is another reason why how the White House treats Jensen and Nvidia is pretty important, because I think if you're the White House, you don't want to crash, you know, you don't want to do anything to undermine that growth. So it's all part of that kind of Trump world policy. And it does look like Jensen convinces Donald Trump that America, you know, should allow him to sell some of his chips to China, for instance, at one point. There's a debate about which chips. And eventually it looks like there are some curbs, but then the curbs are relaxed.

• 15:14Gordon Corera?

  The most advanced chips are not being sold to China, but some others are.

• 15:18David McCloskey?

  And it does seem like what has happened here is that Jensen Huang, and there, there are others in kind of the, you know, sort of the AI business who have made similar arguments. But essentially what, what it seems that he's done is he's convinced Trump and others around him that America should sell its chips, some of its chips, maybe not the most advanced ones, to kind of compete globally with Chinese players like Huawei, right? Rather than strictly curb exports to keep all of these chips out of, you know, China's military industrial complex. It's this argument over, do you have really restrictive export controls? Or do you export most of this technology in the hopes of outcompeting the Chinese?

• 16:03David McCloskey?

  And there's kind of a, there's kind of a factionalization, or there had been a factionalization inside the Trump administration around that policy. And Jensen Huang obviously weighed in very heavily in favor of, you know, kind of loosening some of those export controls.

• 16:16Gordon Corera?

  Yeah, because there is a question, which is if you deny China access to the chips, does it just incentivize them to build their own faster? Or is it better to sell them American chips and keep them independent? So it's a really interesting kind of policy debate. But this goes to the key point. Nvidia is an important company, but Jensen Huang is at the center of one of the big policy debates between the US and China. And at a crucial moment, it appears the Chinese look like they're getting very interested in him for reasons you can absolutely understand, can't you?

• 16:48David McCloskey?

  That's exactly right. I think maybe there, let's take a break. We've set up the target, Jensen Huang and Nvidia. And after the break, we'll go deep into the MSS operation that ensnared him.

• 17:05David McCloskey?

  If you want to get ahead with your Christmas shopping, don't forget that a subscription to the Declassified Club makes the perfect gift. Gordon, I know we mentioned the club in every episode, but could you give everyone a flavor of what club membership actually looks like?

• 17:19Gordon Corera?

  The lucky recipient of this gift will get to catch up on all the brilliant bonus content from this year. Things like our series on Kim Philby, 9/11, our interview with the former head of MI5, all of that ad free. And of course, Declassified Club members get exclusive early access to all future releases as well.

• 17:37David McCloskey?

  But being a member isn't just about our exclusive content. It also means being part of our community. We hosted our first ever members event at Bledgeley Park this summer. A fantastic chance for members to meet each other and to contribute to live episode recordings.

• 17:52Gordon Corera?

  And don't forget our weekly newsletter written by producer Becky. Plus, every annual gift comes with a special edition t-shirt, merch.

• 18:01David McCloskey?

  We hope this has made you even more excited about the club, whether you're treating yourself this Christmas or you know someone who would love to join.

• 18:08Gordon Corera?

  And it is the easiest gift to give. You just head to the rest is classified.com/gifts and you can schedule a gift to land in someone's inbox on Christmas Day.

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• 19:06Gordon Corera?

  Well, welcome back. So David, we've talked about Jensen Huang and who he was and why Nvidia is so important. But let's get a little bit into the operation itself and what we know about it and his targeting, which apparently was by China and specifically the Ministry of State Security.

• 19:24David McCloskey?

  Well, The New York Times reported last weekend that a memo, very secretive, highly classified memo, had circulated among top Trump administration policymakers last spring, in advance of Trump's visit to Beijing in May, that cited intelligence that a woman named Alice Huang had been recruited by China's Ministry of State Security. Now, we're going to go a bit deeper into Alice Huang in a moment. I mean, she is a kind of executive in a top customer of Nvidia's. It's worth, I think, setting up the MSS just a little bit, because this is the spy agency behind the operation. Now, the MSS has had something of a renaissance over the past decade under Xi Jinping.

• 20:09David McCloskey?

  It is, we've talked about this in some of our past episodes, an absolutely massive organization, probably hundreds of thousands of people. It absolutely dwarfs in terms of personnel and budget. The CIA, MI6, probably any Western intelligence agency. The MSS is the largest intelligence, like formal intelligence agency on the planet. And it collects all manner of intelligence, human intelligence. It intercepts communications. It obviously runs counterintelligence program. And, and really importantly, It uses its connection to Chinese companies to extend its reach abroad. And frankly, to Chinese citizens working anywhere in the world.

• 20:50David McCloskey?

  So the MSS is, it's not, you know, you think about the CIA and kind of how abroad the CIA might work with an American company on kind of an ad hoc basis. If that American company agrees, I think in the case of the MSS, it is much more tightly integrated into Chinese companies abroad, and frankly, inside China than any of its Western counterparts.

• 21:15Gordon Corera?

  Yeah, so it's kind of working at home and abroad and across the private sector. So the claim is that the MSS was running Alice Wong against Jensen. Now, I guess one of the questions which we might get to is, is when and how the relationship between these two people, which they've now, you know, Jensen has admitted was a romantic relationship, who's having an affair, when it started and how it started. I mean, she is a slightly mysterious figure, isn't she? I mean, there's a bit of detail around her. I did note with great interest that one reference has her having been a former TV reporter, allegedly.

• 21:56Gordon Corera?

  So it's nice to know that that skill set has taken her well into the world of espionage. But rather than staying in the media world.

• 22:04David McCloskey?

  I like that that's the lens you took. You're like, ah, this is a reporter that moved on to bigger and better things.

• 22:09Gordon Corera?

  She supposedly went into banking and kind of other commercial entities and kind of companies. So she obviously realized that TV reporting doesn't make that much money. So she moves around this kind of world and then becomes connected, doesn't she, to a network of companies and investors with links to the technology world?

• 22:27David McCloskey?

  Initially, I think it's these kind of local officials and investors who had, who were involved in the mobile video gaming industry and the data centers around that. And this network has a kind of set of financial links to the Chinese military establishment. Again, all this kind of very murky.

• 22:48Gordon Corera?

  Ties and links.

• 22:48David McCloskey?

  Social and political networks, right? That, that are so, I think, opaque to us outside, but dictate how things actually happen inside China. Since 2023, she had worked for a Singapore-based operation named Megaspeed. That is that Nvidia customer that we had talked about. We'll come back to Megaspeed in, in just a moment. So what was the operation for? People briefed on the intelligence, told the New York Times that Alice Wong had been recruited essentially to do two things. One, to collect intelligence on Jensen as part of a drive by the MSS to learn more about American AI chips.

• 23:31David McCloskey?

  And then, this is the second part, to potentially influence Jensen and the company to push for its most advanced chips to be made available to China.

• 23:42Gordon Corera?

  This is not espionage in the sense of going after deep intellectual property of a company, for instance, or classic national security secrets. It's about understanding the commercial direction, relationships of Nvidia. You know, who's it selling chips to? Who might it be selling chips to? But also understanding Jensen himself and, you know, what his relationship with Donald Trump is, what he's lobbying for, understanding it, but then also potentially having an agent of influence who can affect what that policy is, because you've got such an important individual. So you can see why this is potentially a very valuable place to have an agent, isn't it?

• 24:25David McCloskey?

  Yes, and it is also a very fascinating case study in what, what is the definition of a secret these days? Because the Nvidia board has released a statement, which I find to be somewhat preposterous. We can come back to this, saying that it has no reason to believe either the company's secrets or national security were compromised. I don't think that's true, by the way, we can talk about that. But I think in any case, it requires a very specific definition of what a secret is. Because we don't have any evidence yet that, for example, you know, Alice Wong got access to the underlying designs and IP for the most advanced chips that Nvidia produces.

• 25:10David McCloskey?

  It's possible, but it's, you know, that has not been reported.

• 25:13Gordon Corera?

  That's not what they're after though, is it?

• 25:14David McCloskey?

  I think it's very interesting when you, let's, you know, break it down into the kind of the collection and the influence piece. And I'll, I'll label this as pure speculation for right now. But I'm just thinking about this from the standpoint of what would, what would the MSS be interested in? If you have an asset like Alice Wong, who has a business relationship with Jensen, who has a romantic, personal relationship with Jensen, who can obviously spend time with him, talk to him, influence him potentially. So collection, I mean, the Chinese would be very interested in Nvidia's strategic plans, the details of its customer relationships, how Nvidia conducts due diligence on its partners, a massive issue around these export controls, pricing data.

• 25:56David McCloskey?

  Obviously, the technical specs would be of interest, but maybe harder to get. And I mean, keep in mind that the commercial angle here is very useful to the MSS. Cause it's collecting information, not only in the hopes of being able to use that for consumers in China, but also to help Chinese companies develop potentially down the line, a competitive advantage against Nvidia. So any information that's non-public, this is the key thing, I think, is the Nvidia board has tried to define the sort of, the red line is national security secrets, the kind of typical things that you might consider, you know, an intelligence collection.

• 26:38David McCloskey?

  But the reality is, is that the Alice Wong operation would be very useful in just eliciting any non-public information that is inside Jensen Huang's head or inside Nvidia that's not out there, that would be very valuable to the MSS. So the collection angle here is really important, I think, even before we get to the influence.

• 26:57Gordon Corera?

  Yeah, that's right. And the collection angle includes, you know, what's going on in those conversations between Donald Trump and Jensen.

• 27:03David McCloskey?

  Yeah.

• 27:04Gordon Corera?

  That's high-grade intelligence value. And then, as you said, there's the influence question, which is, can you then use your asset, your agent to influence Jensen to take a particular position, to try and, you know, loosen chip supplies to China, if that's what you want, or to sell them to particular subsidiaries? We might get to that. So there's all kinds of ways in which you can have a real effect through having someone there. But there is one question here, which is about the operation, which is this question about, to some extent, was it a honey trap? I mean, a lot of this comes down to when the relationship began and whether Alice Wong was recruited as a spy before or after that, doesn't it?

• 27:47Gordon Corera?

  We don't necessarily know the answer to that, and that's pretty important, isn't it?

• 27:50David McCloskey?

  We know very little about how the operation was actually run. And I actually, over the weekend, I was, I was messaging with a number of my former agency colleagues and asking them about this at what seemed clear, including some people who know China quite well. What seems clear is that at minimum, there would have been an MSS handler. Now, what is not obvious is whether there was a cutout between that handler and Alice Wong. So the way the MSS operates is, is not always that there's going to be a staff officer of the MSS sitting in front of that person. It could have been that there is some kind of cutout that's used to run Alice Wong, to recruit her.

• 28:32David McCloskey?

  They probably didn't have to do that much development, to be quite honest, but to recruit her and kind of run her. To that part, the chain is unclear. But it is very clear, the way that the MSS operates, that at the end of this chain, there's an MSS staff officer who is collecting this intelligence. That would mean that she was tasked, presumably, like given questions, intelligence questions that the Chinese wanted answered. But it is true that we don't, we don't yet know and may never know the circumstances around when she was actually recruited by the MSS. And whether that, crucially, I think this is the crucial part for the honey trap piece. For this to be a honey trap in the kind of traditional sense, what would have to be true

• 29:14David McCloskey?

  is that the MSS saw that she was connected to Jensen Huang, because maybe Megaspeed's a, you know, a big customer. But the MSS says, look, we want you to get close to Jensen and we want you to establish a romantic relationship. I actually think that's probably not how it happened. I think what's much more likely is that she was already close to him, potentially already engaged in a romantic relationship with him.

• 29:40Gordon Corera?

  And then they approach.

• 29:41David McCloskey?

  And then the MSS approaches and says, you could be helpful to us. Then you're off to the races.

• 29:47Gordon Corera?

  It's different from your classic idea of a honey trap, someone put in someone's path, you know, who is already an agent to kind of seduce them and, and build a relationship, which we've seen with the Russians, the East Germans, lots of other cases, and with China, with the Chinese, I think, at points.

• 30:00David McCloskey?

  Regardless of whether it was a honey trap, at some point, the MSS has a massive amount of leverage over Jensen Huang indirectly, because.

• 30:13David McCloskey?

  He's having an affair.

• 30:15Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 30:15David McCloskey?

  With Alice. So whether the, whether the MSS sort of orchestrates this as a honey trap operation, or whether they just stumble upon it and decide to take advantage of it, the end result is the same, which is that, and this is why I think the board, the Nvidia board's sort of downplaying the national security importance of this, is, is a bit ludicrous, because at the end of the day, the Chinese MSS has a very, very valuable secret that it has collected on Jensen Huang, and that is that he is having an affair.

• 30:48Gordon Corera?

  Compromat in the Russian terms.

• 30:49David McCloskey?

  They, they do effectively. Now, how they used it, if they used it, still unclear. But the point is, is that Chinese intelligence had this guy over a barrel.

• 30:59Gordon Corera?

  Yeah. And it is worth touching on Megaspeed, the company that she's working for, because there's a kind of murky element to that, as to the extent to which that is acting on behalf of the Chinese state, or it's a normal company. And I think that is interesting as well, isn't it? I mean, I do like the name Megaspeed. It sounds like a kind of 80s heavy metal band, but it's, it's a, it's a company which is set up, and I think like lots of other companies around Southeast Asia, to take advantage of this fact that there's a limit on chips going into China. So because of these export restrictions we talked about earlier, some of the more advanced chips can't be sold into China, but you can sell them into, you know, Singapore, Malaysia and other countries around China, build

• 31:43Gordon Corera?

  data centers there, and then rent the computing power to Chinese companies to use. And that looks like what Megaspeed was, was effectively doing, which gave it this close relationship with Jensen.

• 31:58David McCloskey?

  This is a very important point, because the chips never have to cross the border into China in this scenario. You can just use the data centers in Malaysia, or in Singapore, or, you know, Indonesia, and Chinese companies can take advantage of the computing power that Nvidia's chips give them. So it's effectively a workaround. And we have a company, a buyer of Nvidia chips, that has an MSS asset working deep inside it. So the tech has also made its way over, but probably just not at scale. And, I mean, this is, this is the fascinating bit about this operation, is because the, the headlines over the last week have very

• 32:40David McCloskey?

  much focused on the kind of, the romantic relationship, the fact that Alice Wong is an MSS asset, and she is in this, you know, in this relationship with Jensen. But under the surface is, is potentially even the, the bigger story, which is that, or it's, it's a different layer to the story, because Megaspeed is essentially an intermediary in this chain that allows China to get access to the computing power of Nvidia's chips. And it does so through all the, this kind of shadowy chain of, in some cases, very clearly kind of cut out front companies that may not have any actual physical presence,

• 33:25David McCloskey?

  and that they're using as a way to import these kind of chips into East Asia, and eventually to let the Chinese use the compute. But what's, what's, what I find to be really kind of fascinating about this is that the Alice Wong thing is like a human, human layer on top of a bigger kind of commercial and industrial effort to get access to this, to this technology, right? So it's, it's a very multi-layered effort on the part of, of Chinese intelligence and the Chinese state.

• 33:57Gordon Corera?

  And are we clear whether that kind of shadowy network, the kind of supplier network, the front companies, how closely allied they are to the MSS? We don't really know whether they're kind of real companies which then get leveraged by the MSS, or if they're kind of front companies. It's not entirely clear, but they've created this kind of network of companies. And then you could imagine Alice is part of that, and then she meets Jensen, and a romantic relationship develops. And then MSS realize, we've got something even more valuable to, to, to use here. We can build a very direct relationship. So, you know, we're not quite inside what exactly happened, but it's interesting, isn't it? And if we step back for a moment, it does look like that it's the investigation into

• 34:41Gordon Corera?

  Megaspeed that actually gets US intelligence onto Alice Wong and the relationship with Jensen, isn't it? I mean, that's, that is the kind of entry point and the investigation which starts all of this unraveling.

• 34:58David McCloskey?

  Yeah. That is another important point, is that the, the fact that we're having this conversation is not because US intelligence was looking at Jensen Huang or Nvidia. What seems to be the case from the New York Times and the FT reporting, is that the, the starting point for the surveillance on Alice Wong was because of the, those export controls, and the, the fact that the Commerce Department, and I think more broadly, the US intelligence community, is looking at the, these Chinese networks, these kind of front companies and these chains, in some cases, of very sort of dodgy cutouts that are used to bring these chips and the computing power to China. The US intelligence community is looking at this.

• 35:41David McCloskey?

  And so they're looking at Megaspeed. Megaspeed bought billions of dollars of Nvidia chips, and then seems to have brought it into the country through this Malaysian cutout that probably doesn't actually exist, right? It's, it's address is a dilapidated storefront in Kuala Lumpur. So you have this kind of shadowy network, US intelligence is looking at it, right? And in, in that context, I think is, is how they come upon Alice Wong, who's an executive at Megaspeed. And that leads, I think, to electronic surveillance of Alice Wong. And that surveillance turns up at least three things. One is that it

• 36:25David McCloskey?

  seems to be that officials have concluded that she's a Chinese intelligence asset through that surveillance, and that she's funneling information back to the MSS. Two, she's in close contact with an American citizen. And three, she's having a romantic relationship with that US person.

• 36:43Gordon Corera?

  Now, it's interesting, isn't it? Because, you know, let's say this is the NSA, National Security Agency, which is doing, you know, signals interception.

• 36:49David McCloskey?

  Which it almost certainly is.

• 36:50Gordon Corera?

  Almost certainly is. You know, on, you know, it's looking at Alice Wong and looking at Megaspeed. And then they see that there's an American citizen in the mix, because, you know, there's information going back and forth between them and this romantic relationship. Now, what's so interesting is, of course, American spy agencies generally aren't supposed to spy on Americans, are they, David? But.

• 37:15David McCloskey?

  What kind of tone was that, Gordon?

• 37:17Gordon Corera?

  That was my Snowden tone. Channeling a bit of Eddie Snowden. But, but, but, when they're watching, say, a foreign spy, and an American citizen turns up in the intercept, you know, that American's identity is normally masked, isn't it? And they're called like US Citizen One, or US Resident One. And it requires a kind of level of escalation up the chain to get them unmasked in the terminology, and to identify who they are. So in this case, you can imagine, they go, well, let's find out who Alice Wong is, is having a relationship with, and where this information is coming from. They, they, you know, they go through the unmasking process, and they go, oh, it's Jensen, the CEO of Nvidia. Uh-oh.

• 38:02David McCloskey?

  Yes. And this is, so I, I dealt with this as an, as an analyst in the NSA reporting that I would consume, as I'm, you know, writing presidential daily briefs or any other form of analysis, is the way that the NSA distributes those reports is they're not sending you the raw transcript of the conversation, right? There is an analyst and a linguist, whole teams of these people in stations abroad, and also at NSA headquarters at Fort Meade in Maryland, who, for example, would have, they're looking at the Alice Wong, they've tasked her phone, they've somehow, this is the, the thing signators never want to describe, is it's pretty easy to get her phone number. How are they actually getting the content

• 38:47David McCloskey?

  of the communications, right? There's some NSA signater pixie dust that they sprinkle. They are inside her comms. Someone is looking at those calls, messages, emails, transcribing them, trying to bring out the bits that are actually useful to analysts and to policymakers. Now, the actual analysts and linguists, who are these kind of secretive, hidden people out at Fort Meade, would absolutely know, just from listening to the conversations or being in the phone or the computer, that it, that it's Jensen on the other side. But to your point exactly, you don't want to be distributing, those intercepts are probably going to thousands of people in the US intelligence community.

• 39:32Gordon Corera?

  You don't want his name on it, do you?

• 39:33David McCloskey?

  So you, you don't want his name on it. We had this issue with various Middle Eastern countries, where you'd have targets of our collection, who were talking about their conversations with US officials, right? And even as, even as they're talking about US officials, the NSA would mask the identity of those officials. And then what would happen is those intercepts would get distributed, sent down to the NSC, and all of these people at the NSC, because they're kind of narcissists, would want to know who, well, who's he, who's he talking about? Is he talking about me? Is he talking about someone else? Right? And then, and then they would ask for it to be unmasked, so that they could understand who this or that foreign leader was talking about. And so, so in this case, they're looking

• 40:16David McCloskey?

  at this, and they're like, well, who is US person number one, right? And Jensen's name comes up. It's like, it's Jensen Wong. This is late 2025, we should say. This is a year ago.

• 40:27Gordon Corera?

  This is, that's the bit that I find astonishing, is that this happens a year ago, that they discover that he is the one having a relationship with a suspected Chinese MSS agent. We should of course say the Chinese deny any allegations of spying. We always, you know.

• 40:43David McCloskey?

  That is, we should put that, that is Gordon's line in every episode, is to make sure that.

• 40:47Gordon Corera?

  I'd just like to be fair to the MSS.

• 40:50David McCloskey?

  Whatever baddie is out there, that they, they, their denial, their placiferous denial is communicated to our listeners. Yeah.

• 40:59Gordon Corera?

  But, you know, so here we go. So we've got this detail, and it gets briefed up to the president, to Donald J. Trump. And he seems to do nothing with it. I mean, this is what's so interesting. Here's this guy who's cultivated him. They've cultivated each other. They've got a close relationship. Doesn't seem to change the relationship as far as we can see from the surface. I mean, there was this interesting thing where, you know, I think it was early in the year where Jensen wasn't originally on the Air Force One flight to China. And then he kind of, at the last minute, Trump kind of gets him on. But again, I mean, fundamentally, the relationship is still there, which is frankly, quite hard to explain, isn't it?

• 41:42Gordon Corera?

  Other than perhaps the value of Nvidia as a company to the US stock market and the close relationship between its CEO and the president. I mean, I'm not quite sure how else to understand it.

• 41:55David McCloskey?

  I don't think there is another way to understand it. I think that's exactly right. I mean, well, I think it's actually important to think about this through two lenses. One is, why wouldn't you make it public? Which I think does make sense, right? It makes sense to potentially not publicize that.

• 42:10Gordon Corera?

  To watch, understand.

• 42:12David McCloskey?

  To watch, understand. I mean, obviously, if you publicize it, there are some sources and methods that you're going to blow, right? By doing so. And so there's a whole, I mean, this is again speculation, but below the waterline here, there is obviously a massive effort by the US intelligence community to map these Chinese companies and the individuals involved in them that are trying to circumvent our export controls. So you'd probably be concerned that if you bring this kind of thing to light, that some of that collection then goes away and you lose your insight.

• 42:47Gordon Corera?

  Yeah, it's also worth saying, isn't it, that particularly a year ago, the US officials don't believe that Jensen himself knew that she was a Chinese agent. So it's not the claim that he was kind of knowingly involved in this. And you do get an interesting question there, which is why then wasn't he defensively briefed and told that person that you're dealing with? Because that's happened in the UK Parliament, frankly, where people have been defensively briefed because they've been told the person working for you, for instance, is suspected to be linked to Chinese intelligence and you should keep your distance. Now, sometimes people to keep the distance, sometimes they don't. But there doesn't appear to have been a defensive briefing.

• 43:28Gordon Corera?

  And instead, you get this kind of highly classified memo drafted. It looks like linked to the Secretary of State Marco Rubio, according to the New York Times, you know, warning officials about this relationship, which is circulated around. But it is odd, isn't it? You can understand why they want to watch it and understand it, but not to say to Jensen, be careful about this because you may be spilling secrets. That feels surprising to me.

• 43:58David McCloskey?

  I wonder if the intelligence community suggested a defensive briefing and potentially was overruled by the president or the White House. It would certainly be responsible to have given one. It's such a mess in some ways because at the top of it, you have Trump, who is personally invested in this guy, likes this guy, is financially connected to Jensen, has, I mean, a massive amount of the gains in the US stock market in Trump's second term have been because of Nvidia. Trump's making money himself off of it. So, and frankly, I mean, you think back to the 2016 election and some of the kind of issues around Russian interference

• 44:42David McCloskey?

  and US collection on the Russians that bled over into collecting information incidentally on US persons and the Trump campaign. Trump's really sensitive to this kind of thing, too.

• 44:52Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 44:52David McCloskey?

  And I wonder if there's also a part of this that's like, you know what? Jensen's not giving this woman anything that, you know, the Chinese don't already have. And he's, obviously, it's clear from the surveillance that they're sleeping together. So this is an embarrassing, like, this is an embarrassing thing, I think, for Trump to bring to Jensen. And so they just, it seems like it was just like, let's just bury this thing. And he'll be careful, you know?

• 45:16Gordon Corera?

  We then get to the question about why does this emerge now? Which I think is an interesting question as we get to the end. And I think in my mind, understanding how journalism works and how government works, you can imagine there might be people within government who are like, for a year, we've known about this and there hasn't been a defensive briefing. Nothing's been stopped. People haven't been warned about it. There is a kind of roadblock somewhere within the administration maybe to doing that. So frankly, we're going to talk to the New York Times or somewhere else and, you know, get this story out so that it's dealt with, unfortunately, through the public domain, from Jensen Huang's perspective, rather than, you know, through a quiet way.

• 45:57Gordon Corera?

  But quite possibly because of that frustration, that nothing had been done and nothing had moved. That would be my guess, and that is, you know, speculation. But I guess, David, where does this all leave us? I mean, Jensen is still there in post, we should say, you know, he's apologized.

• 46:10David McCloskey?

  He's admitted to the affair.

• 46:12Gordon Corera?

  He's admitted to the affair and he's apologized. He said he'll cooperate with an investigation by the board. We should say, though, that it's a very unusual company. It's very personalized around him and increasingly members of his family. And so he's still there and it's hard to see him leaving very easily. He's so associated with the company. But it's going to be rocky and there'll be congressional hearings, I'm sure, and things like that, where there's questions asked about, you know, what he knew, whether he suspected it and, you know, what the administration knew about it.

• 46:45David McCloskey?

  Just to go back very briefly to the point on why now? I mean, I should say, all of the sources for the Times piece at the FT are anonymous. And so you kind of have to read between the lines on what sort of sources they are. It seems obvious that at least some of them had either access to the surveillance intel itself on Huang.

• 47:09Gordon Corera?

  Or knowledge of it.

• 47:10David McCloskey?

  Or knowledge of it, or had access to, some of them definitely have read the memo that Marco Rubio put together, essentially warning Trump that maybe this is a bad idea to let this guy participate in the summit with Xi. It seems likely from an intel security angle, I mean, the CIA, NSA, like, most of the people there would view the Chinese as an enemy and would not share Jensen's kind of view that there's a commercial opportunity here that's not going to affect national security. I think. And so there'd be a lot of people in the intelligence community who would say,

• 47:51David McCloskey?

  this is absolutely, it's almost criminal to allow this, to allow the Chinese to continue to have access to this guy, not bring it to his attention, not bring it to the public's attention, whatever it might be. And then also, but there's also the other piece of this is that, and this is just kind of looking forward. Even if Jensen survives at Nvidia, which I agree with you, seems likely, even though I think the stock's down like 5% today as we're recording this, which is a pretty significant chunk. Is he ever going to have credibility again as he lobbies to loosen, to sell more chips to China? Like, he's completely had his legs kicked out from underneath him by these leaks. And the idea that even if he didn't give up much of consequence,

• 48:36David McCloskey?

  even if they're just sort of, you know, the Chinese are just kind of getting atmospherics and a sense of what Trump's, you know, maybe the Chinese are just getting a lot of things they already know. I'm not sure that that's true, but even if it is, there's no way that this guy is going to be able to kind of stand up a year from now and make authoritative arguments about kind of China AI policy anymore, right? I mean, he's going to be, his credibility is really weakened. So that's another angle to this, is there a political faction inside the White House or inside the government that is kind of like, they're China hawks. They don't want the Chinese to have access to this stuff and they want to take Jensen down. And leaking this is a great way to do that.

• 49:17Gordon Corera?

  I think that's entirely possible. And I think, you know, it's a way of undermining him, challenging the policy, but also, I think, alerting people that this is something that goes on. Because, you know, I think it's quite possible, in fact, quite likely, given what we were saying about the scale of Chinese intelligence and the MSS, that there's lots more of this happening. Nvidia is perhaps the biggest and, you know, most important company in this field. But it's not going to be the only one that's getting targeted by China in this way.

• 49:46David McCloskey?

  Gordon, do you think that Jensen's lobbying of Trump is being driven by the Chinese?

• 49:54Gordon Corera?

  The influence point.

• 49:55David McCloskey?

  The influence point. I mean, that, because that's the biggest, that's the biggest, I think, question is, when you look at the timeline of Alice Huang's relationship with Jensen, it seems to start in the summer of 2024. And actually, there have been WeChat photos of the two of them that have been made public today, kind of anchors then. That is before Jensen begins his kind of massive lobbying push into Trump world. Now, you could make the case that, well, he has a commercial incentive to do this anyway. But it is, the overlap is very interesting. And I think it raises all kinds of questions about how much of that was in some way,

• 50:36David McCloskey?

  was any of it or was some of it, all of it driven in part by Beijing and the MSS?

• 50:43Gordon Corera?

  Of course, and the answer is, we don't know. It would be interesting to know.

• 50:46David McCloskey?

  Sounds like a boring answer, Gordon.

• 50:48Gordon Corera?

  But, but, but I'm going to say, I'm going to, I'm going to say that I think, because you raised this point with the question, which is, the commercial instinct to sell chips to China was aligned anyway with Nvidia and the commercial drive. And I just think he had a reason to take that policy anyway. So I don't think you need to explain it through any kind of Chinese influence. It kind of made sense. And I think often when you look particularly at the US, Washington and business and lobbying and the positions companies are taking at the moment on all kinds of issues, but especially AI, I think you can just follow the money. You don't always have to kind of take a spy link to it. But you're right, it's a good question.

• 51:30Gordon Corera?

  And, you know, whether we get more clarity on that, well, let's see, you know, in the coming days and weeks as more of this comes out. Because I'm sure, David, as we finish, more will be coming out. There's no doubt, is it? I mean, it's such a kind of wild, interesting story that there's bound to be more.

• 51:46David McCloskey?

  Yeah, and Trump and Xi are meeting in China next week. So maybe, I actually, I actually don't think this is going to come up, would be my hot take.

• 51:55Gordon Corera?

  Bit too embarrassing.

• 51:56David McCloskey?

  But it will certainly be just under the radar. Well, I think that's a great spot to end this week's intelligence scoop on whether Jensen Huang was the victim of a Chinese honey trap. As a reminder, if you have thoughts on this, please reach out to us. The rest is classified at goalhanger.com. Send us your take on this question. And as a reminder, go and join our declassified club if you want more of this. You can do that at the restisclassified.com, where you'll get access to all kinds of wonderful bonus content. And if you join right now, you can tune into our Watergate series

• 52:38David McCloskey?

  and get a wonderful bonus mini series on a wild CIA officer named E. Howard Hunt. Hope you enjoyed and we'll see you next time.

• 52:48Gordon Corera?

  See you next time.

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