HONG KONG — Megaspeed, the tech company at the center of the Chinese spy scandal that engulfed Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang , said Thursday it will cooperate with U.S. government investigations.
Megaspeed’s statement came hours before the resignation of Huang, one of the leaders of the AI boom, who co-founded the American chipmaker and helped build it into the world’s second most valuable company.
In its first statement since reports emerged about Huang’s extramarital affair with an alleged Chinese spy, raising concerns over U.S. national security and the future of the tech giant, Megaspeed said Thursday that it takes its obligation to comply with U.S. export control laws “extremely seriously.”
NBC News has reported that U.S. intelligence agencies determined that Alice Huang had an affair with the Nvidia CEO and was a Chinese intelligence operative.
She held a senior position at Megaspeed, a Singapore-based company that was one of Nvidia’s biggest customers in Southeast Asia. Megaspeed is under U.S. criminal investigation for allegedly smuggling American-made chips into China in defiance of U.S. export controls. Singapore said Thursday that its own criminal probe into server shipments was ongoing.
Megaspeed said in the statement Thursday that it has “cooperated with inspections by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) and stands ready to cooperate fully with any other relevant U.S. government authority.” The statement was signed by its chairman and CEO, Tan Yong Pong, who also goes by James Tan.
It said that “Megaspeed is committed to working constructively and transparently with the U.S. government.”
China has dismissed the spying allegations as “smears” and on Thursday, a Foreign Ministry spokesperson said that “the U.S. side should stop fabricating so-called espionage narratives as a pretext for implementing technological blockades.”
Megaspeed did not address the allegations surrounding Alice Huang, but said that “to further reinforce our commitment to compliance, Megaspeed has retained a leading U.S. law firm to lead a comprehensive census of its graphics processing units (GPUs) and independently verify its export control compliance practices.”
The company added that it “welcomes appropriate government scrutiny and is committed to demonstrating through concrete actions that it operates responsibly, transparently, and in accordance with applicable U.S. laws.”
Nvidia’s stock price has plunged since its 63-year-old chief admitted over the weekend to being “unfaithful” to his wife.
Huang quit on Thursday in the wake of reports that he had multiple extramarital relationships. In a statement, Nvidia said “Colette Kress, current Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of NVIDIA, has agreed to serve as Interim Chief Executive Officer.”
Nvidia’s board met Wednesday night to address Huang’s future at the company, a source familiar with the matter told NBC News, adding that the White House was aware of the meeting.
The scandal has raised questions about how much U.S. government officials knew about Alice Huang and Megaspeed.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio circulated a memo to officials in the Trump administration in spring outlining how U.S. intelligence showed that the Nvidia CEO was in a romantic relationship with a business executive who was an asset of China’s spy service, according to a person familiar with Nvidia and a former national security official with knowledge of the matter. The New York Times and the Financial Times first reported on this memo.
Alice Huang’s precise role and relationship with China’s spy service remains unclear, however. It’s possible she was not a career spy for China’s spy agency, the Ministry of State Security (MSS), but was asked to cooperate and share information based on her access to Huang, a former national security official with knowledge of the matter told NBC News.
Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told NPR that Alice Huang’s role still needed to be clarified.
Democrats will soon hold control of both the House and the Senate and, as a result, will have subpoena power.
On Wednesday night, as the Nvidia board met, Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Chris Coons, D-Del., announced they had written to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick with a request to preserve records on the subject.
A separate criminal investigation is ongoing in Singapore, which said Thursday that it had barred Alice Huang from re-entering the country and issued her with a stern warning after finding that she had knowingly provided police with inaccurate information to downplay her role in the company. It said that Huang was not investigated for espionage.
Singapore’s Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) said in a statement that it had concluded in February there was “insufficient evidence to establish that Huang had committed any offences.” It said that its investigations into Megaspeed and six other individuals are ongoing, related to the shipment of servers via Singapore.
Mithil Aggarwal is a Hong Kong-based reporter/producer for NBC News.