NVIDIA'S JENSEN MET WITH ALLEGED CHINESE ASSET

The New York Times reported Thursday that US intelligence agencies surveilled Alice Huang, a Chinese citizen and former top executive at Singapore data center firm Megaspeed, and concluded she was an intelligence asset passing information to Beijing. That surveillance turned up repeated contact with an American citizen later identified as Jensen Huang, no relation, the man who decides who on this planet gets AI compute. Nvidia's answer is that she was a customer contact and nothing more. Spokesman John Rizzo said the diversion allegations against the cloud firm were "thoroughly investigated and debunked last year," and the company noted Jensen meets thousands of customer executives annually. Jensen told Bloomberg that Nvidia reviewed every GPU deployment at the firm and "counted every one," a sentence that holds up right until somebody asks a second question. Megaspeed's Malaysian sister company bought at least $4.8 billion in Nvidia-based equipment in under two years, which the Times called unusual for a small, obscure company. The Times did not report that Jensen knew about any intelligence activity, though some senior Trump officials reportedly doubt he was fully in the dark. Trump was briefed roughly a year ago and took no action, reportedly to avoid disrupting chip sales and the China trade relationship. Mediaite is playing that inaction as a scandal ahead of his China trip. Nvidia is playing it as nothing. The White House, CIA and NSA all declined to comment, which is its own kind of statement.

Why you should give a shit: The guy with his hand on the world's AI supply now has a counterintelligence story attached to him, and the official response from Washington is a shrug and a trade trip, so "he meets a lot of people" is currently functioning as US national security policy.