TEHRAN — Jensen Huang built Nvidia into the indispensable supplier of the AI boom and convinced Washington that U.S. leadership depended on it. His resignation on Thursday leaves a harder question: how did a company with such political reach become the center of an export-control scandal the Trump administration supposedly failed to contain?
The immediate scandal is personal. Huang acknowledged an extramarital affair, and reports of other relationships with Nvidia subordinates deepened pressure on the board.
But the more consequential concern was his relationship with Alice Huang, a former executive at Singapore-based Megaspeed.
U.S. officials reportedly suspect her of “working for Chinese intelligence.” No public evidence has established it; the separate scrutiny of Megaspeed’s business is better documented.
Nvidia says it has no reason to believe company secrets or U.S. national-security interests were compromised.
Nvidia said Huang had resigned as president, chief executive and director, effective immediately. Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress was named interim CEO; longtime director Harvey C. Jones became the company’s first board chair. After 33 years at its helm, he had become the company’s public face.
Shares fell as much as 14 percent Thursday, after already retreating from a record high amid AI valuation concerns.
Megaspeed and the spy narrative
Megaspeed bought large quantities of Nvidia equipment and built data-center capacity in Southeast Asia, which could be leased to Chinese customers.
The Information reported that companies linked to Alice Huang helped facilitate at least $7.5 billion in Nvidia chip sales through Chinese companies since 2023.
U.S. authorities are reportedly examining whether hardware was diverted to China in violation of export restrictions. Megaspeed claims it is a legitimate business and has pledged to cooperate with U.S. investigators.
Singapore’s account complicates the espionage allegations.
Its Home Affairs Ministry said it began investigating Megaspeed in February 2025 over suspected false declarations in server purchases and related commercial offenses. It explicitly said Alice Huang was not investigated for espionage.
In February 2026, police found insufficient evidence that she had committed the suspected offenses.
They nevertheless issued her a stern warning, saying she had knowingly provided inaccurate information to downplay her role, and barred her from re-entering Singapore. The investigation into Megaspeed and six others remains open.
That does not settle the U.S. inquiry or rule out diversion, but it leaves a gap between public evidence and Washington’s most dramatic claim.
The practical questions are more concrete: who bought the chips, where the hardware went, which customers accessed the computing capacity, and whether Nvidia and U.S. regulators checked those transactions properly.
Beijing has also been trying to reduce Chinese dependence on Nvidia, encouraging domestic alternatives and restricting imports of U.S. processors.
Reuters reported this month that about 600,000 H200 chips were sitting in Hong Kong because Beijing had not approved large-scale shipments to the mainland. Chinese companies still want Nvidia’s software and computing power, but the government is pushing them toward domestic suppliers.
A private network exploiting Chinese demand for Nvidia capacity does not, by itself, establish a state-directed intelligence operation.
The White House knew
The political question is why Megaspeed remained off the Commerce Department’s Entity List, which can restrict access to U.S. goods and technology, despite warnings from other agencies.
The New York Times reported that a Commerce inquiry stalled after Nvidia’s general counsel contacted an official. The department has not publicly accepted that account.
The Times also reported that Commerce had not added a company to the list for more than a year, its longest pause in 18 years.
The warnings reached the White House. The Washington Post reported that Secretary of State Marco Rubio briefed President Donald Trump in May on intelligence concerning Huang’s relationship with Alice Huang, shortly before the Nvidia chief joined Trump’s trip to China.
Huang boarded Air Force One anyway. Trump later defended him as an honorable man and gave an unclear account of when he first learned of the allegations.
On Friday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent took the dispute public. He said Treasury, the Pentagon, the State Department and the U.S. trade representative had supported adding Megaspeed to the Entity List for months, but the decision rested with Commerce. “Commerce has the pen,” he told CNBC.
Bessent also questioned whether Nvidia had properly vetted Megaspeed and possible shell-company intermediaries.
His remarks shifted attention from intelligence speculation to the administration’s failure to use powers it says are already sufficient to stop sensitive chips reaching China.
The contradiction runs through Trump’s own policy. Following Huang’s lobbying, the administration permitted sales of Nvidia’s H200 chips to approved Chinese customers, reversing earlier restrictions.
Now senior officials are arguing over whether a Southeast Asian company should have been blacklisted for allegedly helping Chinese customers gain access to Nvidia technology.
The administration has tried to defend commercial access while promising to restrict China’s technological rise. Megaspeed shows what happens when those goals collide, and enforcement becomes a matter of interagency politics.
Congress is seeking answers. Republican committee chairmen had requested a closed-door briefing from Huang on Nvidia’s security practices before he resigned, and lawmakers say they still want to hear from him.
Washington faces an uncomfortable reckoning: explain why its own warnings failed to move Commerce, and whether an industry with extraordinary access to the White House can be regulated at all.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: tehrantimes.com
