OMFG, it's an open secret that lots of Malaysia-, Indonesia-, and Singapore-registered businesses resell GPUs to China instead of building AI datacenters themselves. And they don't need to sleep with NVIDIA's CEO to do that, you know.
Hence there is no way the US did not know of this.
My conspiracy theory is that the US used this to pump "poisoned" Nvidia chips (with hardware trojans via fab masks) into Chinese datacenters. Maybe the Chinese found out (they stopped buying) and hence this was framed publicly with/without the consent of the parties involved (who may not know they were just pawns) as "CEO honeytrapped by beautiful spy" which is a nice salacious piece of popular news.
PS: Michael Barr wrote a sci-fi novel "Metacompiler" which has something about hardware trojans - https://metacompiler.me/