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Comment by atdt | Hacker News Reader

The story was broken by the New York Times. New York Times journalists Tripp Mickle and Ana Swanson got a tip from from "a tech industry contact"[1] in August. They worked sources and investigated until they were ready to break the story in October.

Based on the photos that have been popping up, the tech industry contact could have been any one of the comparatively large number of people in position to observe what was going on.

  [1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/10/podcasts/the-daily/nvidia-jensen-huang-affair-chinese-spy-trump.html?showTranscript=1

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I don't think it's as simple as an intern that saw them holding hands and blurted it out. That's not how you get this level of detailed and nuanced information: "That revelation came after The New York Times broke the story of how U.S. intelligence officers uncovered what they say was a plot by Alice Huang to use their relationship to funnel information to Beijing."

There is almost certainly some level of coordination between said "intelligence officers" and these reporters to make this a public story. They are choosing to comment and provide details on this particular issue, and they are doing so strategically.

Not to agree or disagree with the comment you’re responding to, but there’s two months of investigation between August and October. The initial tip could have come from anyone, the detailed and nuanced information is what comes from the last two months of investigation.

But absolutely, cui bono is a good question to ask.

Two months with nothing then a "breakthrough"? Or with something but asked to hold? All possible. Don't be naive, The NY Times doesn't operate like some student paper writing everything they see exactly when they see it.

Why this conspiracy take? It’s perfectly reasonable for a respectable news org to dot their t’s and cross their i’s with their lawyers before they come out with the story.

It is plausible that they waited to publish it after the elections. But august vs october imo does not matter, this was a thing for much longer anyway, so the "why now" still stands and refers to when the leak initiated rather than when it was published.

What? That’s the opposite of what I said. They got a tip, they took the time to investigate it. How is that “ writing everything they see exactly when they see it?”

Of course it was not as simple as that. Investigative reporters earn their keep. They spoke to a lot of sources, including sources in US intelligence. But that is not unusual for any important story: people in government like to talk, even those who work in three-letter agencies, for a mix of personal and professional reasons.

Your comment above implies that the answer to "Why now?" is: "Because covert powers so decided." There is nothing in the story that disproves that, but also nothing that requires it. The initial tip could have been ordered from above, but it could just as easily have come from any one of dozens if not hundreds of people, motivated by just about anything: grievance, envy, high-mindedness, malice, vanity.

For something like this, at this level, involving these geopolitical players, you can guarantee that anyone from a 3 letter agency talking to the New York Times is doing so with a specific goal in mind.

Exactly. I mean look at how the Bush administration manufactured consent for the invasion of Iraq via the false WMD claims. These agencies consistently have agendas and narratives they selectively reveal to the press and that shouldn’t be a secret to anyone.

Well at that time it wasn't clear that WMD were non-existent (or they just weren't able to found them).

Iraq gov did everything to make it look like there are: prevented any inspections, blatantly lied to UN etc.

This is akin to "where there's smoke there's fire" (on the level of gossip and hearsay and rumors) except of course for the fact that a war was based on this information, many people died and a country fell into ruin as a result...

There was procedure to make it not gossip -- UN mandated inspections. Iraq blatantly prevented them, and intentionally made it look like they are stockpiling WMDs. Good play on their part to trick US and UK.

Look up "UN Security Council Resolution 678 and Resolution 1441".

It was pretty clear, to both the government with access to the data, and also to a lot of average citizens. It was kind of obvious it was a pretext for a misguided retaliation for 9/11, a wounded Bush admin lashing out, trying to look strong.

The Iraq government prevented inspections in defiance of multiple UN resolutions for many years, during several admins, not just Bush admin. Note it was UN rules, not US. It just no country besides US wanted to enforce the UN resolutions.

It was even clear from the presentation to the UN that the claims were bullshit. "We don't have proof-proof, but we think it's because they are hiding their labs on trucks that they drive around, here's some lame computer-generated imagery..."

Look at leaks at Apple. Some people are holding onto hot information and want to blab. It doesn’t have to be some master plan.

Apple leaks are usually not related to privileged knowledge of national security concerns, for one. Nobody blabs about the next iPhone with the intent of canning executives.

Apple is not a three-letter government agency.

Based on the information so far, it is irrational to say we can guarantee this.

On top of the national security implications, there are credible reports of both export control violations AND political interference with a Commerce Dept investigation into these violations.

If there is anyone talking with a specific goal, it can be as simple as calling out the political interference or trying to warn the public that the administration isn't taking the export ban seriously.

Not all "specific goals" are nefarious or 12-dimensional chess. A lot of people talk to reporters, including at the NYT, because they're genuinely frustrated at not being able to do their jobs.

Aren’t there two “why now?”s here? One is: “Why did someone tip the NYT off?” And the other is: “Why did the US government confirm the spy allegations?”

I don’t think we know that either is even true in the sense that there wasn’t any prior tipping that just didn’t get the follow up. If someone forced me to guess, then: a) there likely where tips before. But b) the Trump government didn’t want that story out there and c) the feeling towards NVIDIA was strictly positive (~the one company earning honest money)

Both b) and c) changed recently. There is much more public opposition to the AI buildout today than even half a year ago and the midterms dealt a significant blow to Silicon Valley’s influence in Washington

But the affair wasn’t particularly private, given the social media posts about their appearances together, was it?

> people in government like to talk, even those who work in three-letter agencies, for a mix of personal and professional reasons.

People in 3 letter agencies don’t usually risk a lifetime of prison to exchange gossip on an affair.

Once the press has enough information that government employees know a story is coming, they can decide whether and how they want to talk about it.

So the above ambiguity about whether the timing resulted from OSINT and journalism running its course or a leak still stands.

No. Information that is public can still be classified. It's strange. Years ago, I had a clearance, and I know people got in trouble for saying in public things that were in the press. A newspaper clipping could contain information that would get me in trouble for having in an unsecured location.

Absolutely not. People working in the agency couldn’t even discuss Snowden stuff that was already disclosed publicly because it was still classified.

Unless it's authorised

There are tons of examples of just that happening. The most prominent one might be Aldrich Ames, but there's a lot more.

LEOs at all levels have been getting sentenced left and right lately for using government spying systems to stalk people. Your confidence in the integrity and rationality of people given access to power and information is baffling to me.

Jensen's conspicuously close relationship and public sightings with Alice Huang were already on the radar of an observant Hindenburg Research-esque short seller firm back in May:

NVIDIA (NVDA): The China Problem

https://culperresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Culper...

It uses careful language to avoid implying/defaming anything that couldn't be supported by publicly verifiable info but clearly found their relationship questionable to say the least.

Any investigative journalist worth their salt would have latched onto that possibly salacious hint and started digging. If anything it's surprising this had been quasi-public for months given the trillions at stake from either side of the trade.

It certainly didn't need a strategic CIA leak or House of Cards style knife in the back to doom Jensen. Embarrassing in retrospect how poorly they concealed it.

I just doesn't get having sex with a Chinese woman laundering chips to China makes him leaking info to China. Those are some serious allegations. I agree that Alice Huang has a relationship with Jansen and Alice is likely secretly getting B300s into China, but the China spy part? And how come sleeping with a spy (assuming she is a spy) unknowingly means he need to be kicked out of the very company he built and grow for 33 years, if some congressman did the same thing with a real spy backed by strong evidences still keep his seat for a few years more. That is just unfair and obviously a political move.

Sleeping with him means having access to his stuff when he is asleep.

That's not a crime for him though.

Yes it is. If you go to court and claim you were tricked by a spy into earning billions of dollars for yourself by overcharging all US business and consumer customers, you are going to jail.

The affair claims and spies don't actually matter. Jensen had nvidia smuggling chips to china. All that matters now is who knew or should have known. It is pretty crazy that the CFO took over when its impossible for a CFO to not know 20% of revenue is coming from smuggling gpus to china.

I don't think ends until the entire c-suite and board are all in jail. If jensen really has 60 direct reports, then we need to get 60 jail cells ready.

People need to stop pretending that the richest and best paid people in these companies have some kind of deniability, they do not.

Isn’t the CFO on record as having strong doubts about the deal making going on, with Huang castigating her publicly for impeding them?

> tricked by a spy into earning billions of dollars for yourself by overcharging all US business and consumer customers

Is that the case ?

bring back the guillotine!

> I don't think ends until the entire c-suite and board are all in jail.

Have you seen corporate crimes in the US? No way an entire c suite goes to prison. One person, maybe. Two or three tops.

> People need to stop pretending that the richest and best paid people in these companies have some kind of deniability, they do not.

They have money and status. How did Elon escape that bs when he said he’d take Tesla private with “funding secured”? If you or I committed such blatant market manipulation, we’d have serious consequences. It’s different for the mega wealthy (which is the primary problem).

> It’s different for the mega wealthy (which is the primary problem).

It's a feature of reality. That's why all this chatter about taking billionaires down a peg or two is ultimately fruitless. All you're doing is aiding someone else's power play -- who will then have the excess privilege and power that rankles the masses. But there is nothing to be done, it has always been that way, and always will. Those who think communism or any other governmental structure actually solves this problem, is deluded; it just transfers the power somewhere else. Putin is richer than Bill Gates.

Every revolution in history has been a struggle between elites aided by the masses. There's never been one where the masses took over the elites.

So? Every henchman of our 100 person software shop has their laptop encrypted, do you think Huang carries NVIDIA trade secrets on a note in his wallet?

Perhaps you are simply not very imaginative, but there are multiple ways to turn sexual access into something more...

Spying being the operative word, it's very easy e.g. to plant listening devices, or drugs, or threaten with blackmail...

If you put on the leather authentication jacket it logs you into master control

Having sex with each other doesn't mean they actually sleep together, or that he carries around all the trade secrets with him to be snooped on, or that she is given unfettered access to his home, office, etc.

The affair or affiars are likely not real. Just a cover for his smuggling activities. People need to come to terms with jensen being a chinese spy.

The entire country of taiwan is at risk due to jensen. He sold out taiwan and the US to china.

It might not be that. Nvidia donated $25M to Trump’s ballroom and $1M to his inauguration fund.

The administration could be complicit in treason, if substantiated by evidence in a court.

Literally anyone could be complicit in treason, if substantiated by evidence in a court.

I don't think it's been alleged that he has been deliberately leaking info to China. But making decisions for the benefit of a single customer acting as a Chinese cutout to circumvent US export rules risks serious legal or reputational damage for Nvidia. And overall means he could be making other decisions not in the interest of Nvidia shareholders while under her influence, consciously or unconsciously.

Nvidia is going to be a political punching bag facing endless subpoenas and hearings because of him. Didn't even have to wait until the new Congress - the lame duck Congress is already getting started so it's not a one sided partisan Republican or Democrat thing either.

Plus, as others have pointed out, the Nvidia board appeared to have been preparing to back him up and ride out the story after his first carefully written apology/statement. But that seemingly changed after news of the second affair broke which means he may not have been candid with them and made the breach of trust unsalvageable. Unfair or fair doesn't really enter into it, it's not his company anymore, he only owns ≈4% of it. Nvidia board/shareholders would have wanted to keep him running things if at all possible given his track record.

Evidently some straw broke the camel's back, but we don't know for certain whatever it's something that's been revealed publicly so far. It's high profile news because of Nvidia's size and prominence in the AI industry but he's far from the only founder to be pushed out of the company they founded because of a personal scandal.

The political argument doesn't really make sense to me considering Trump bent over backwards to defend him, right up until minutes before he resigned. And the admin seemingly avoided intervening for months after it became known to U.S. intelligence, even adding him back to the China trip after he was originally left off the roster.

I mean, did you hear Trump’s statement on 60 Minutes, where he said he called one of the leaders of the big AI companies, and told him he was going to jail? Given the current situation, who else could this apply to?

Things were pretty hostile with Dario there for a minute

Trump going to give him a pardon if he starts to get tangled up with leaking info to China.

Leaking 2 days after election results implies that Democrats will aim to imprison Jensen Huang and Donald Trump. Trump may have influenced DOJ to “look the other way”. The fact that NVIDIA donated heavily to Republicans while Anthropic donated heavily to Democrats is interesting. I see this coming up in the next 6-months in Congressional Hearings and Impeachment efforts.

It seems like Congressional hearings are going to be a de facto denial of service attack on tech executives. Can't do much else if you are testifying every day.

That is one way to force an industry-wide AI pause.

trump deserves to be in prison for several things, among them an attempted coup on Jan 6th and stealing classified documents

the US lost a lot of credibility globally not putting him away

> how come sleeping with a spy (assuming she is a spy) unknowingly means he need to be kicked out of the very company he built

The board backed him after "sleeping with a spy" came out.

The board did not back him when, days later, "sleeping with a staff member who reports to him" came out.

And a lesson for future founders: never give up control of your company.

Zuckerberg & Musk were more visionary on this front and they can never be fired from the companies they created.

Sure, if you're the kind of guy who sleeps with your subordinates and Chinese spies.

> Sure, if you're the kind of guy who sleeps with your subordinates and Chinese spies.

So future founders who plan to take companies public

Jensen lost that kind of control over nvidia within a year of founding it.

And nobody should invest in these companies.

Zuckerberg is surrounded by sycophants who simply abide him chasing trends that turn out to be bad ideas (eg. The libre currency, the MetaVerse, a massive open sourced LLM project, Oculus).

And we all suffer because he just buys up competition rather than allowing "creative destruction" to happen, leading to healthier competition.

And yet, despite all those dumb actions, he remains the uncontested leader of a half-trillion company. This is all more reason to never give up control if you can, it's not like you can wish yourself to become a visionary CEO; if you are not then the creative destruction will destroy you and take your winning lottery ticket away.

Probably didn't disclose second one so that created a lack of trust or board knows much more.

PS. Not to mention that "sleeping with a customer" is also (beyond her being a honey spook or not ...) against NVIDIA's internal code (for whatever that might be worth ...)

She is a "honey pot" or sometimes you will see "honey trap." "Honey spook" is not a thing

https://www.thoughtco.com/exocentric-compound-words-1690583

it's going to trouble you when you learn all words are made up

Elon gots multiple babies with his reports.

Nobody should be confused about whether Elon is a mentally unstable man-baby at this point, with his prolific tweets and public behavior.

Reproductively more successful than anyone commenting here ever will be.

And that’s ultimately all that matters.

And still unstable man baby not worth respect. Turns out money and ability to pay women to use your sperm dont mean you are not ... unstable man baby.

you mean - producing more unstable man-babies to this world into big money positions? That is going to end up "really well" for this world, I'm quite sure

Well.. then why is jensen getting the boot?

You dont think under 3 years of sleeping around the world in different hotels, she did not get to his unlocked laptop?

All this while he was in shower thinking how great life is, and what a stud he looks on a leather jacket?...She must have had all confidential designs for the next 10 years of NVIDIA roadmap including the confidential financial partnerships and circular deals...

While currently living in Beijing, they dont do statues there, but she might get her own photo in the entrance hall of the Chinese Ministry of State Security.

I actually don't really think he forgot to press Win+L or that he doesn't have it on an idle timer. I'd be really really shocked if his personal security is that weak.

> The real question people should be asking is "why now?"

> That's not how you get this level of detailed and nuanced information... There is almost certainly some level of coordination between said "intelligence officers" and these reporters to make this a public story

are you wearing a tinfoil hat right now slash are you familiar with "no true scotsman" fallacy?

I never disputed that it was investigated by the press. I’m disputing that the relationship is simplistic, lacking tit-for-tat. Even the most “experienced journalists” are basically seen as useful idiots when it comes to the world of power. It doesn’t make one a tinfoil hat to acknowledge this.

> Even the most “experienced journalists” are basically seen as useful idiots when it comes to the world of power. It doesn’t make one a tinfoil hat to acknowledge this.

:buddyareyouserious:

The NYT has been infamous for pushing false narratives from government sources for decades. Iraqi WMDs is the famous example, but they've also credulously run plenty during the current wars.

Being wrong, and accepting incorrect information without appropriate vetting is not, at all, "pushing false narratives" which is a strong accusation with, to my knowledge, absolutely no basis in reality once you leave the right-wing mainstream media bubble.

What exactly is the difference between uncritically publishing information from government sources and pushing false narratives? If their reporters are being fooled over and over again every time a war needs to be justified, it's hard not to see a pattern that looks very similar to collusion in producing propaganda.

This is not an example of the no true scotsman fallacy. A commenter opined on one plausible scenario for "why now." Another disagreed. The scotsman fallacy requires both a universal generalization and a specific repudiation of that generalization (therefore disproving it), neither of which occurred.

No evidence was presented showing that government sources did not work with journalists to publicize a narrative that furthered some agenda from within that agency. Sources from that agency talked; the only question is why now and not OCTOBER OF LAST YEAR[1] when this relationship was broken in the press.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/09/technology/nvidia-chips-c...

Detailed and nuanced knowledge about swerving the export controls has been available for months. Including short sellers finding Huangs relationship with that "spy" problematic. Reporting suggests Rubio found Nvidia's behaviour problematic, but he couldn't do anything about it.

So you had an "anti" nVidia cohort massing.

I think borrowing costs making build-out unprofitable on paper broke the magic-spell A.I. held over investors.

Now people are willing to listen to the anti-nVidia cohort. Maybe that enabled some schemes, maybe it was just a dam of sentiment collapsing.

IMO, it has everything to do with the midterms and Nvidia covering their ass.

The affairs are secondary to the illegal exports which could put Nvidia in a lot of hot water. The trump admin wasn't going to do anything about this, which has been made pretty clear, but now that Dems are going to have investigatory power and are likely to win in 2028, Nvidia is facing some potentially really serious legal liabilities.

Pushing out Jenson and blaming as much as possible on him is a way for Nvidia to try and shed their culpability (at least some of it). I think he's acting as a fall guy. I don't think that he was the only one involved in the illegal exports to China, he couldn't be. But framing it that way is convenient for the company.

You are seeing a lot of companies sing different tunes after the midterms (Alex Karp hilariously talking about how he's super woke and so is palantir now. Aetna splitting with CVS, for example) because I think they all realize they are at risk of congressional hearing and potentially follow up prosecution under the next dem admin. Or even additional regulation. Trump's admin was very lax in regulating businesses.

The intern could have been the source in August and then everything else you describe happened between then and when the NY Times was ready to publish.

This seems like conspiracy thinking? Reporters doing their jobs is a simpler explanation. Once the NYT figures out what's going on, it's going to get reported.

Also, in August 2025(!), Gamers Nexus released a 3.5h hour long documentation about the NVIDIA GPU black market in China[1]. It's worth a watch.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1H3xQaf7BFI

This has been surfaced a lot in the recent discussions and I gave it a go yesterday. This one is so so so good. Not only the black market which I think is totally OK for NVIDIA to do, but the damn guy who soldered more RAM to a 4090. That was worth every second of my time.

Yeah, that was quite impressive!

There are (were?) kits available in China where one would salvage the GPU chip and VRAM from a 4090 card and solder them to a new board, then add an additional 24GB.

If I knew anyone who could do the work safely, I'd happily have my 4090 converted.

https://gpusolutions.net/ lists three different ram upgrades for different nvidia cards.

The story was broken by Culper Research (an investigative short seller) in April[1]. They may or may not have identified Alice Huang as a Chinese intelligence agent/asset, but they identified Jenson + Alice relationship and the GPU embargo bypass via MegaSpeed / Singapore.

The problem seems to be that even when the short seller broke the info and put money on the bet that it didn't break open this case to the public and the Nvidia BoD didn't take serious action then.

The difference seems to be the FBI / intelligence case against her, and in the recent days investigation into what Luttnick did (or failed to do) as Secretary of Commerce, basically allowing Nvidia to sell to cut outs by failing to fund any enforcement of the law Congress passed. Luttnick seems to have lost a lot of power after the Blue Wave promises to bring Congressional investigations.

[1] https://culperresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Culper...

This is a Chinese government operation to impede US progress on AI while they catch up.

Its likely the Chinese were using spies to get secrets, blackmail, etc. but it seems less like one grand conspiracy than an opportunistic power grab once the sharks smelled blood in the water, or a confluence of many smaller conspiracies.

Or they just felt their asset was expended and why not get one last bit of value in the process of throwing it away? Though I suppose that could fall into either category, depending how you wanted to look at it.

Impede US progress by smuggling GPUs into China? Isn't the more likely answer that they are business people trying to make money?

> smuggling GPUs into China

the Chinese stopped the leaking faucet in favor of local hardware, these kind of embargo never works anywany, we've seen this with nuclear weapons, how naive would we be to think any different

smartest way would be going for the addiction route and nip the local hardware production, which is harder than it sounds

Possibly. (I wish my) money is on investors high up in the tree earning money off of nvidia and other tech stonks collapsing. It could be both even, what do I know.

China is ousting their own spy? the opposite.

Its an actor that wants to stop the US sending chips to China -- it seems that all this was going on with the knowlegde of high ranking US officials. Now that the story is out, they cant pretend anymore that they dont see it

I keep thinking this would have been a good time for China to play that card.

There was some reporting on it way back in 2025.

no wonder NYT is fake news, they gossip without strong evidence.

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