A prominent commentator has challenged a central premise of the scandal that toppled Nvidia Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Jensen Huang, arguing that Alice Huang, whom US intelligence officials suspect of spying for China, may not be a spy at all.
French entrepreneur Arnaud Bertrand made the case in a widely shared post on X. "This is the biggest irony of the whole Alice Huang / Nvidia saga: the Chinese government actually doesn't want Nvidia chips and is actively keeping them out of the country," he wrote.
Bertrand pointed to reports that Beijing had ordered Alibaba and ByteDance to cancel Nvidia orders and sent customs teams to ports to inspect advanced chips.
Citing Reuters, he said about 600,000 Nvidia H200 chips are stuck in Hong Kong because China will not let them in. He also cited Nvidia's annual report to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, which says Beijing has discouraged customers from buying or using its data centre products.
On that basis, he argued, the theory that Chinese intelligence ran honeytraps to bring more chips into China "gets the whole thing exactly backwards".
Bertrand described Megaspeed, the Singapore-based company where Alice Huang was an executive, as a private-sector workaround to those curbs. He said it built data centres in Southeast Asia and rented computing power to Alibaba, which the New York Times called "a backdoor way of getting access" to Nvidia chips.
That backdoor, he said, bypassed both US export controls and China's own drive to wean firms off Nvidia.
Asking who benefited, he named Nvidia, Chinese firms still reliant on its CUDA ecosystem, and, citing TechRadar, the US administration.
He said Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick had explained last July that selling chips to China was meant to leave developers "addicted to the American technology stack". The Chinese state, he argued, gained nothing.
He also highlighted a Financial Times report that a person who knows Alice Huang said China's Ministry of State Security had asked about her this year, after Singapore began investigating her company over chip-smuggling allegations.
If she were an asset, Bertrand asked, why would the agency need to ask? He added that Shanghai police detained her business partner, reportedly her husband, in a stock manipulation case.
Bertrand said no evidence had been published that she is a spy, only anonymous intelligence officials repeated by journalists.
US intelligence officials suspect Alice Huang of spying for China, while her precise role and any link to Chinese intelligence remain unclear.
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