Japan · Asia Post
I t’s beginning to look a lot like 2017, thanks to ex-Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. The Nvidia co-founder’s career has spontaneously combusted since he admitted last week to an extramarital affair with Alice Huang, a Chinese businesswoman who U.S. officials suspect of being an asset or agent of China’s Ministry of State Security, its equivalent of the CIA. A trio of House committee chairs have demanded Huang appear before Congress to brief them on his ties to Ms.
Huang (no relation). On Monday, The New York Times revealed that he’d also had a second affair with one of his subordinates, leading Nvidia’s board to move towards tossing him out of the company he’d started three decades earlier. The tech billionaire’s problems have brought about a temporal vibe shift — reviving and exposing Trump administration infighting and leaking at a level not seen since the heady early months of the president’s chaotic first White House term.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang with Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick at the G20 Innovation Ministerial summit in September. Huang was forced to step down this week after admitting to an affair with an alleged Chinese spy and Lutnick is under increased scrutiny for his department’s decisions surrounding the scandal (Reuters) To start, the Times scooped that Marco Rubio, Secretary of State cum National Security Adviser, was so sufficiently alarmed at what U.S. intelligence officials were learning about Alice Huang through electronic surveillance that he drafted a classified memorandum detailing how she’d allegedly been recruited by the Chinese spy agency. The goal of the Chinese operation was reportedly to send Alice Huang to target Jensen Huang in hopes of learning more about his products and influencing him to push Nvidia towards selling Beijing more of the company’s cutting-edge AI chips, according to reports.
Rubio was so concerned by what he read about the Nvidia CEO’s relationship with Alice Huang that he made a point of briefing President Donald Trump on the memorandum while aboard Air Force One en route to China this past May. Yet the Secretary of State’s warnings appeared to have little effect on Trump. He was so hell-bent on having Huang travel with him to Beijing that he ordered his Air Force One crew to wait at an Alaska air base for Huang to meet him there on a private jet.
Trump appeared to have been taken in by a charm offensive the then-Nvidia CEO was mounting to convince him to relax export controls on his company’s top-end chips. The Nvidia co-founder’s career has spontaneously combusted since he admitted to an extramarital affair with Alice Huang (right), a Chinese businesswoman who U.S. officials suspect of being an asset or agent of China’s Ministry of State Security, its equivalent of the CIA (Reuters) The Biden administration had restricted their export out of concern that acquiring them could help foreign adversaries (mainly Beijing) gain an advantage over the U.S. in the race to develop the most advanced AI models. Huang’s effort was incredibly successful.
Having curried favor with the president by way of a $25 million corporate donation to the controversial White House ballroom project, Trump and his allies began giving Huang a freer hand in who he sold his products to. In turn, Huang became a frequent visitor to the White House. At the same time, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick — the U.S. official responsible for administering the country’s export control regime — was reportedly refusing to impose any sanctions on Alice Huang’s company, Megaspeed, despite serious concerns from the U.S. intelligence community over whether the company was serving as a front for Beijing’s efforts to acquire more of Nvidia’s top-end products.
Now, with Huang having been forcibly exited from the empire he built, the scrutiny is intensifying on Lutnick. Administration officials have always been reluctant to so much as hint at criticizing Trump, and his cozy relationship and seeming willful ignorance of Jensen Huang’s dalliance with an alleged Chinese honeypot is no exception. But the Commerce Secretary, a longtime friend of Trump’s going back to their days as New York City high-rollers, does not inspire the same fear.
Newly resurfaced audio, from the tech bro favorite All In podcast, reveals him boasting about his own close relationship with Huang, who he called a “national treasure” that he had brought into Trump’s inner circle. “I promised him in the beginning when I first met him that I would help him have really easy access to the president,” Lutnick said during a podcast taping in January, speaking to a cohort of hosts that included the then-White House AI Czar, David Sacks. He described how Huang sold Trump on relaxing export controls by arguing that it would keep China dependent on his own AI chips rather than building up domestic manufacturing, and said Trump agreed with the caveat that Nvidia pay a 25 percent tariff when importing them into the U.S. for testing.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attends a luncheon with other tech leaders hosted by President Donald Trump at the White House in September (Reuters) “He (Huang) has to send the chips to America. We test the chip to make sure that he hasn’t enhanced it in any way... On the way in, we can charge it a tariff, a regular 25 percent tariff, and then we can give export licenses to whoever he wants to sell it to.
He sends it to China, or he sends it to whoever he’s selling it to,” Lutnick said. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent wasted no time pointing the finger Friday when he told CNBC that it was the Lutnick-led Commerce Department who resisted putting Megaspeed, the China-linked company, on his department’s “Entity List” of companies not allowed to purchase American products. Asked whether the Trump administration considered adding Megaspeed to the list, Bessent replied: “I can tell you there was coordination.
It was Treasury, War, [the U.S. trade representative], and State. They were in favor of putting Megaspeed on the entity list for months. But Commerce has the pen.” Then, he twisted the knife.
“You will have to ask them about their internal process,” he said. More embarrassment for Lutnick came in the form of a leak to Axios revealing that he’d been one of the officials who’d received the Rubio memorandum warning about Jensen Huang’s ties to Alice Huang and Megaspeed. And things may get worse.
Lutnick is scheduled to testify before Congress on this very matter within days. Last time he was on Capitol Hill, he gave a questionable performance under questioning about his relationship with deceased sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein. This time, he will have to explain why he didn’t care that one of America’s most important companies was selling sensitive products to a company with suspected links to Chinese espionage.
Source: The Independent
