Rohan Javet Beg

One night in June of 2024, in a Taipei bar, a Chinese businesswoman named Alice Huang made a bet with some technology executives that she could get Jensen Huang, the C.E.O. of Nvidia, to come meet them. After midnight, he showed up, wearing his black leather jacket, and joined the group for some whiskey drinks. (One of the executives who was there told the story to The New York Times.) Alice Huang, who is not related to the Nvidia C.E.O., was a top executive at a Singapore-based company called Megaspeed. In the three months after the meeting Megaspeed bought a billion dollars' worth of Nvidia technology. In the next nine months, it bought another billion dollars' worth. On paper, this was all legal. Megaspeed built data centers in Malaysia and then rented the computing power to Chinese companies, mostly Alibaba. The U.S. bans selling its most advanced A.I. chips to China, but it's O.K. to rent the computing power to Chinese companies in a neighboring country. But in late 2024, a U.S. Commerce Department official visited Megaspeed's Malaysian data center and found Nvidia chips still in their boxes. Investigators began to suspect that some of the chips were being moved on into China. And then, as the Times revealed this past October, things got worse. US intelligence had concluded that Alice Huang was a Chinese intelligence asset, reporting to China, and that she developed a close personal relationship with Jensen Huang. President Trump was briefed about a year ago and decided not to do anything. The Times reported that he didn't want to risk Nvidia chip sales, which are helping drive the stock market. Jensen Huang was never told about the intelligence finding. Nvidia says that it's the C.E.O.'s job to meet with customers, that Megaspeed got no secrets, and that the company found nothing wrong in its investigation into the smuggling allegations. Jensen Huang has said that Nvidia can account for all of Megaspeed's chips. Ultimately, stopping the chips from going to China came down to two judgments. One was Nvidia's word about its customer. The other was a president weighing an intelligence finding against trade with China and an economy that Nvidia sales are helping boost. In a case like this, American export controls are only as good as those two decisions.