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American spy agencies had gathered striking intelligence.
A top executive at a Singapore-based data center company was under scrutiny for possibly steering advanced Nvidia A.I. chips to China. And now American officials had concluded that she was a Chinese intelligence asset, funneling information to Beijing.
But what came next was even more alarming. Surveillance of the executive, Alice Huang or Huang Le, a Chinese citizen, revealed that she had developed a close relationship with Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive.
For years, Washington has worked to deny China the technology needed to match or surpass the United States in the intense global competition for superiority in artificial intelligence. The discovery that Beijing was getting reports from someone with direct access to Mr. Huang, one of the most powerful figures in the A.I. revolution as well as an influential ally of President Trump’s, set off alarms at the White House.
Roughly a year ago, Mr. Trump was briefed about the intelligence findings, which have not been previously reported, and chose not to do anything with the information. Mr. Trump has been wary of disrupting Nvidia’s chip sales, which are helping to drive the economy and the stock market, and of further complicating the trading relationship with China.
This account is based on interviews with people briefed on the surveillance, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the findings are drawn from classified intelligence, as well as other officials and industry executives and analysts.
American officials already suspected that Ms. Huang was helping China evade constraints on its ability to gain access to advanced A.I. chips.
But the revelation that she was feeding information directly to Beijing raised more troubling possibilities, including that Mr. Huang had insights into Mr. Trump’s thinking on an issue of vital importance to both nations, one likely to come up when the president visits China next month. And it left questions about whether she could be gleaning information about Nvidia, which as much as any company accounts for the lead the United States has maintained in developing cutting-edge A.I. models.
Mr. Huang has not received a defensive briefing, warnings sometimes given to Americans who are being targeted by foreign intelligence services, people briefed on the surveillance said.
The surveillance of Ms. Huang continues, they said, and companies that have been affiliated with her continued this year to purchase Nvidia chips.
Nvidia said the company that employed Ms. Huang, Megaspeed, was like any other regional customer and that it had previously investigated and debunked claims the Singaporean company was smuggling chips to China. John Rizzo, a spokesman for Nvidia, said: “Jensen’s interactions with Ms. Huang are not unusual or unexpected. Meetings with customers are part of a C.E.O.’s job; Jensen talks with thousands of customer executives every year.”
Nvidia is “confident that if the U.S. government believes that any person is a threat to American industry, it would let us know,” Mr. Rizzo said. Customers like Megaspeed, he added, “receive ordinary business information — not sensitive Nvidia trade secrets — and zero information relevant to national security.”
The White House, the C.I.A. and the National Security Agency all declined to comment. In a statement to The New York Times, Megaspeed said that its “current leadership” takes the matter “extremely seriously and is committed to getting to the facts behind these allegations.” It added that “outside counsel has been retained to conduct a thorough internal investigation and has notified the U.S. government that we are fully committed to cooperating.”
Ms. Huang did not respond to requests for comment. It is not clear how closely she is still connected to Megaspeed. A person familiar with Megaspeed’s operations said that Ms. Huang had become less active in the company in the wake of the American investigations.
Asked about the American conclusion that Ms. Huang has been collecting intelligence on behalf of Beijing, Liu Chang, the spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, said the United States was pursuing a campaign of “groundless smears and slanders” against China.
When Mr. Trump was initially briefed on the intelligence last year, U.S. officials did not believe the Nvidia executive knew that Ms. Huang was gathering information for the Chinese. It is unclear whether intelligence officials have since updated their assessment, but some senior officials inside the Trump administration doubt that Mr. Huang could have remained unaware of what they had concluded was her intelligence-gathering role for China.
Questions about whether Megaspeed was providing A.I. chips to China became public through articles published last year by The New York Times and Bloomberg News.
Mr. Huang has successfully lobbied the administration during Mr. Trump’s second term to loosen regulations on artificial intelligence companies and roll back tighter restrictions on the sales of Nvidia’s chips to China. He also negotiated a deal with Mr. Trump that allowed the U.S. government to take a 25 percent stake of certain Nvidia chips that the government allows to be sold to China.
The close relationship between the president and Mr. Huang has impeded efforts to clamp down on Nvidia’s chip sales abroad, current and former U.S. officials said. They described some investigations and proposed trade sanctions involving China or Nvidia as having ground to a halt within the Commerce Department, the agency in charge of regulating chip exports.Nvidia has said that it complies with the law and that there is no evidence of its chips being smuggled to China. Mr. Rizzo said China’s government has “blocked U.S. AI chips, protecting its own industry.”
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Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia, is influential at the White House on technology policy and has developed a close relationship with President Trump. Credit…Manuel Orbegozo for The New York Times
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