BANGKOK (AP) — China on Monday denied trying to ensnare Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang, calling the spying accusations unsubstantiated and a smear campaign against Beijing.
Huang acknowledged his close relationship with a business executive and apologized to his wife and the company in an open letter posted on Nvidia’s website. He did not name the woman.
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Nvidia announced on Sunday that it was conducting an independent investigation into reports that Huang was a “target of foreign intelligence operations.”
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The New York Times reported that U.S. intelligence agencies determined that the woman was gathering information for Beijing.
“I support the investigation and will cooperate fully. I love our country and our company. I am committed to protecting NVIDIA and supporting the national security of the United States,” Huang said in the letter.
At a regular news conference on Monday, a Chinese spokesman rejected suggestions that the country was using the woman as a spy.
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“The so-called Chinese espionage accusations are baseless and are completely smearing China,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun said on Monday.
Beijing earlier dismissed a New York Times report that Huang had developed a close relationship with a Chinese citizen named Alice Huang, who ran a company that was accused last year of illegally shipping advanced Nvidia computer chips to China.
Nvidia shares fell about 5% in pre-market trading on Monday morning.
The New York Times said Alice Huang is a former executive at a Singapore-based data center company called Megaspeed International, whose website highlights its partnership with Nvidia.
Read more: Taiwan accuses nine people of illegally exporting artificial intelligence servers, including Nvidia and Supermicro employees
Many offices in Singapore were closed on Monday for the holiday. Megaspeed and Singapore’s Ministry of Home Affairs did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Nvidia is one of the most valuable public companies in the world, along with Apple and Microsoft. Its sales of computer chips to China have sometimes been targeted by U.S. regulators seeking to limit Beijing’s access to such technology.
“The key question is whether he was aware of any espionage activity and whether any classified or strategically sensitive information was compromised,” said George Chen, a partner and chairman of the digital practice at The Asia Group, a Washington-based consulting firm.
“These questions require evidence, not speculation,” he added in a briefing to reporters.
In recent years, Huang has lobbied Washington to ease restrictions on Nvidia chip sales to China, and this year won approval from U.S. President Donald Trump to sell its H200 chips. It is unclear whether Beijing will allow Chinese companies to buy these chips in large quantities. Nvidia said in an August regulatory filing that it had sold only a small number of products to China because the Chinese government restricted such sales.
The H200 chip isn’t Nvidia’s most cutting-edge model, but it’s still advanced. Previously, Huang also lobbied Trump to allow the sale of Nvidia’s less advanced H20 chips, which are designed to comply with U.S. export restrictions to China.
Chinese media focused primarily on Huang’s admission, with state media largely responding to the government’s official line. Some people said that the New York Times report was intended to destabilize U.S.-China relations.
“Whenever Sino-U.S. relations begin to improve, there are often shots fired in the dark,” the state-run Global Times said.
AP Business Writer Chan Ho-him in Hong Kong contributed to this report.
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