A blow to the technology giant: due to ties between Nvidia's CEO and an alleged Chinese spy, 240,000 American chips arrived in China, and the company's value collapsed by hundreds of billions.
According to Reuters, suspected spy Alice Huang, along with her husband and sister, created a network of companies in China and Singapore to purchase Nvidia chips. When the supply fell under the US export restrictions, it used personal connections with CEO Jensen Huang - as a result, it was able to transfer about 240 thousand H100, H200 and A100 chips to China. Some have been accepted by Alibaba, Tencent and small AI labs.
Jensen Huang admitted to the employees that he cheated on his wife, but did not reveal the details of the relationship. The FBI is investigating whether the 63-year-old Nvidia chief may have been the target of a foreign intelligence operation.
According to the New York Times, in May, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Donald Trump about intelligence linking Huang to an alleged Chinese spy. It was at least the second such report to the US president in seven months.
The scandal also hurt Nvidia's capitalization. At the end of trading on November 10, it fell to about $4.07 trillion. During two trading days - November 9 and 10 - the company lost approximately $428 billion in value, and since the beginning of November the decline has exceeded $910 billion. After information about the scandal appeared, the share price fell by 11.1%.
Meanwhile, a conspiracy theory has gone viral on social media that Beijing has allegedly been introducing "sleeper agents" into Silicon Valley for decades through marriages and relationships with founders of IT giants and influential business representatives.
The supporters of this version combine the wives and partners of famous billionaires into one alleged spy network:
Julien Zhu - born in China, wife of Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle.
Wendy Deng - born in China, ex-wife of media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
Carrie Frodo - born in Hong Kong, wife of Hubert Frodo, founder of Franco.