The NVIDIA chips involved are banned in China.
A Chinese company with ties to Alice Huang procured NVIDIA AI chips banned in the country, which were then installed at a Shanghai AI facility that also has ties to Alice Huang, according to Bloomberg. The publication says the documents it has reviewed for its report shows explicit evidence that there's a network of Chinese companies, which have managed to get their hands on NVIDIA chips that weren't supposed to be sold in China, with Huang at the center.
US officials believe that Alice Huang is a spy recruited by China's main intelligence agency to target NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang. The goal was apparently to learn more about America's AI plans and to get Jensen Huang to persuade the US government to let his company ship its more advanced chips to China. Before he stepped down as CEO of NVIDIA, Jensen Huang reportedly admitted in a staff memo that he had an affair with Alice Huang.
To the public, Alice was an executive at Singaporean company Megaspeed, but the reports that had come out since the issue blew up paint a different picture of who she truly was. Bloomberg says the NVIDIA chips listed in the documents it reviewed were sold to Aperia Cloud Services, an NVIDIA Cloud Partner in Singapore.
