Yao Yao Jiang: How many more secrets is Jensen Huang hiding?
This video reviews the unusual words and actions of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in recent years, focusing on cases where employees of Supermicro and Nvidia were suspected of smuggling AI chips into China, as well as Jensen Huang's close ties with Huang Le, a Chinese businesswoman accused by US intelligence agencies of collecting intelligence for Beijing, exploring his role and motives in the US-China chip rivalry.
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Hello everyone, I'm Yaoyao Jiang, who loves deep thinking and strict logic. On October 29, The New York Times broke the news that US intelligence agencies monitored a Chinese businesswoman and determined that she was passing intelligence to Beijing. In the surveillance records, the names of the Americans who had contact with her were redacted. Later, media verification revealed that this person was none other than Nvidia boss Jensen Huang. This is not the first entangled affair between Jensen Huang and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Last May in Taipei, when asked whether Nvidia's chips had flowed into China, he said there was no evidence whatsoever, adding that a set of chips weighs nearly two tons and no one can stuff it into a bag. Ten months later, US prosecutors released surveillance footage showing someone in a warehouse in Southeast Asia using a hair dryer to peel off the labels and serial numbers from real servers and stick them onto fake servers. The co-founder of Supermicro who was indicted was pictured in a group photo at the Nvidia conference just three days before his arrest. Two senators demanded that the Department of Commerce investigate thoroughly whether Jensen Huang's statement back then that there was "no evidence" of chips flowing into China had misled the US government. Whose side is Jensen Huang actually on? In this episode, we lay out his unusual words and actions over the past few years, one by one. After watching, you can judge for yourself!
The story starts with those two-ton machines in Taipei. In May 2025, right before the opening of Computex Taipei, Jensen Huang was surrounded by reporters as soon as he arrived in Taipei. During that period, both the US Congress and the Department of Commerce were pressing on the same issue—whether the chips Nvidia sold to Southeast Asia had been rerouted into other hands. He told Bloomberg reporters that there was no evidence showing the chips were being transshipped. Transshipment is not allowed, and servers are very heavy; a full server system weighs about 2 tons, and it is impossible for anyone to put a 2-ton server in a pocket to transship it. However, before he made these remarks, cases of chips potentially flowing into China had already aroused suspicions and concerns across various sectors. In late February 2025, Singapore charged three men with deceiving Dell and Supermicro regarding the ultimate destination of servers, which very likely contained Nvidia chips. By March, Singaporean prosecutors stated that the transactions involved in the case reached $390 million. In April, the US House Select Committee on the CCP began investigating Nvidia's chip sales in Asia, seeking to clarify whether China's DPC had indeed utilized Nvidia chips that it was not supposed to obtain. When Huang was interviewed in Taipei, he had just accompanied Trump on a visit to the Middle East, and the Trump administration had also just announced the cancellation of a set of AI chip export rules established during Biden's tenure. This set of rules was originally designed to prevent chips from flowing into China via third countries. During the interview, Huang once again expressed opposition to such trade restrictions.
Less than a year later, on March 19, 2026, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York unsealed an indictment. There were three defendants. The first, Liao Yiqi, 71, a U.S. citizen living in Fremont, California. He was a co-founder of Super Micro Computer (Supermicro), as well as a company director and Senior Vice President of Business Development. His business involved installing Nvidia chips into servers and selling them as complete units to data centers. The second, Zhang Ruicang, 53, was the general manager of Supermicro's Taiwan office. The third was a Taiwanese middleman surnamed Sun, 44, whom the indictment refers to as a "broker." The story told by the prosecution is as follows: In 2024 and 2025, a Southeast Asian company purchased approximately $2.5 billion worth of servers from Supermicro, many of which were assembled in the U.S. and contained Nvidia chips that were prohibited from being sold to China. The servers were first shipped to Supermicro's factory in Taiwan, then sent to Southeast Asia. Once the goods arrived, the company would remove the servers from their original boxes, place them into unmarked boxes, and ship them to China. The indictment, seen by The Wall Street Journal, also stated that by the end of 2024, this group was already arranging orders and transshipments for Nvidia's then-most advanced Blackwell chips. Reportedly, the indictment also cited a text message in which someone from the Southeast Asian company asked Zhang Ruicang whether a shipment should be sent to Shenzhen or Hong Kong first. Zhang Ruicang replied that going through Hong Kong would be faster. The indictment covers a specific period: from late April to mid-May 2025, over a span of about three weeks, at least $510 million worth of servers were shipped into China. Jensen Huang said in Taipei that there was no evidence that the chips were being diverted while the goods were in transit to China.
The servers entered China, but in Supermicro's records, they were still in Southeast Asia. Supermicro has a compliance department that sends personnel to customer sites to verify whether the sold servers are still in their original locations. In fact, starting in late 2024, Supermicro began auditing this Southeast Asian company. Prosecutors say Zhang Ruicang arranged for a "friendly" auditor to go through the motions. In August 2025, Supermicro arranged a more rigorous inspection. Prosecutors say Zhang Ruicang and the broker surnamed Sun placed thousands of fake servers in a warehouse rented by the Southeast Asian company. These fakes were modeled after Supermicro machines, could not be turned on, and were packed in Supermicro boxes, looking no different from the real thing. For this setup, the broker surnamed Sun calculated the manpower needed: about a hundred people, including forklift drivers and catering staff, plus a 20-seat bus to shuttle them between the hotel and the warehouse. On the day of the manual inspection, the compliance officer sent by Supermicro did not actually arrive at the site; the indictment says he was out having fun. The expenses were covered by the Southeast Asian company. The broker surnamed Sun simply took some photos of the fake servers and sent them to him, which sufficed. In December 2025, officials from the U.S. Department of Commerce were also scheduled to inspect, and they set up the fake servers again. The warehouse surveillance cameras captured this scene: the broker surnamed Sun and another middleman were using a hairdryer to blow on the server boxes, peeling off labels and serial numbers from real machines one by one, and then sticking them onto the fake servers.
On March 19, 2026, Liao Yiqi and the broker surnamed Sun were arrested; Zhang Ruicang is at large. The most serious charge Liao Yiqi faces carries a maximum sentence of 20 years. The next day, Supermicro's stock price fell by one-third. The company stated that it was not a defendant and that the actions described in the indictment violated company policy. Liao Yiqi subsequently resigned from his position as a director. Three days before Liao Yiqi's arrest, on March 16, Nvidia held its annual developer conference in San Jose, California. Supermicro posted a photo on the social platform X showing Jensen Huang standing in front of the Supermicro booth, shaking hands with the boss of Supermicro, while Liao Yiqi was standing nearby, secretly smiling. Nvidia issued a statement. The statement said that strict compliance is Nvidia's top priority, and that illegally transshipping regulated U.S. computers to China is a losing business no matter how you calculate it. Nvidia provides no service or support for these transshipped systems, and its enforcement measures are strict and effective. This statement did not mention the comment Jensen Huang made in an interview in May that there was "no evidence" that the chips were being transshipped to China.
However, senators from both parties introduced it. On March 23, Democratic Senator Warren and Republican Senator Banks jointly wrote a letter to Commerce Secretary Lutnick. The letter quoted Jensen Huang's original words and then wrote that these statements were not only wrong in hindsight, but at the time he spoke, there were already reports that contradicted his claims. These statements may have misled U.S. government officials. The two senators demanded three things from the Department of Commerce: suspend and re-examine export licenses for NVIDIA chips sold to middlemen in China and Southeast Asia, specifically naming Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Singapore; require future license applications to include independently audited end-user commitments; and investigate whether NVIDIA executives' statements about "no transshipment" were severely untrue or misleading, and whether they affected the issuance of licenses. When Supermicro ran into trouble, NVIDIA could still claim that it was the partner's own problem. However, just a few months later, Taiwan prosecutors found evidence pointing directly to NVIDIA's own people.
On May 20, 2026, Taiwan prosecutors and investigators raided and detained three people on charges of falsely reporting AI server exports. This was the first time Taiwan took action against AI chip smuggling. A few days later, Jensen Huang flew to Taipei to attend Computex. When reporters asked him for his views, he said that, ultimately, Supermicro must manage its own company well, and he hoped they would strengthen and improve compliance management to prevent such incidents in the future. He also said that NVIDIA had always been extremely rigorous in explaining export control regulations to all partners. When he said this, none of the detained individuals were NVIDIA employees yet. Two months later, on July 24, prosecutors conducted a secret raid and summoned Zhang Denglong, a senior business development manager at NVIDIA Taiwan. The court subsequently ordered him detained incommunicado, making him the seventh person detained in this case. On August 24, the Keelung District Prosecutors Office indicted nine people. The indictment detailed how a Taiwan company called Flying Tiger Technology managed to purchase NVIDIA's latest generation B300 servers to channel into China. NVIDIA has a set of rules for selling these servers: buyers must first enter NVIDIA's whitelist and sign an end-use declaration guaranteeing they will not resell or export to targets of U.S. sanctions. For purchases of 8 or more units, Supermicro Taiwan and NVIDIA Taiwan must also send personnel to conduct on-site inspections of the buyer's data center.
Flying Tiger Technology bypassed these checkpoints one by one. In February 2025, it took control of a Japanese company to serve as an overseas transit station. Flying Tiger Technology itself also obtained whitelist status. A deputy director at Supermicro Taiwan leaked the review process to Flying Tiger Technology, allowing it to prepare documents in advance. Supermicro would check where the buyer's money came from, so another company advanced the payment for Flying Tiger Technology to bypass this hurdle. Flying Tiger Technology also rented server rooms from Chief Telecom, posing as its own data center. Prosecutors stated that the electricity and network bandwidth of this data center could not possibly support 130 servers. In September 2025, NVIDIA senior employee Zhang Denglong and others went to this data center for an on-site inspection. After the inspection, Zhang Denglong sent an email to his superiors at NVIDIA stating that the inspection was complete and requesting approval for the order. Supermicro subsequently agreed to sell 130 B300 servers to Flying Tiger Technology. These 130 servers were delivered in three batches. Among them, 96 units were sold to two Chinese customers: 40 units went to the first, some shipped directly and some routed through Indonesia; another 34 units were sent through a company called Longying, making a detour through Indonesia and Japan before still reaching the second. As for the final 56 units, Flying Tiger Technology planned to use forged Supermicro web pages to apply for export licenses for shipment to Japan. Before the license was approved, customs found inconsistencies in the data and intercepted the goods. Prosecutors calculated that the actual person in charge and the general manager of Flying Tiger Technology made more than 21 million USD in profits, equivalent to over 670 million New Taiwan Dollars. The actual person in charge of Flying Tiger Technology, whose surname is Chen, has already fled and was not included in this indictment.
Prosecutors viewed Nvidia's Zhang Denglong as the key figure who gave the green light to release this batch of goods, requesting the court to sentence him and three others to the statutory maximum of 5 years in prison. There were two charges: breach of fiduciary duty harming the company's interests (termed "breach of trust" under Taiwan law), and forgery of documents. Prosecutors also stated that during the investigation he pushed blame onto others and showed a poor attitude. In this case, however, there was a loophole: none of the nine individuals were charged with export control violations, because at the time, Taiwan had not yet criminalized the sale of AI chips to China, leaving prosecutors able to charge them only with harming company interests and forging documents. Currently, Taiwan is amending its laws to make it a criminal offense to sell controlled chips and equipment to China without authorization, whether shipped directly or diverted through third parties. In response this time, the company stated that employees have ample motivation to cooperate with customers in complying with regulations, and Nvidia will assist the Taiwan authorities in getting to the bottom of the matter as soon as possible. Externally, Nvidia claims compliance is top priority, with whitelists, end-user statements, and on-site verifications; yet the indictment shows that a Taiwanese company bypassed all three layers of checks, and the final barrier was breached precisely because Nvidia's own insider gave the green light. Did Zhang Denglong act alone, or did others within Nvidia know? The indictment did not answer, nor did Nvidia.
Just as Taiwan arrested the suspects, the United States made its move as well. In late July, the Bureau of Industry and Security under the U.S. Department of Commerce, which oversees exports, confirmed it was investigating possible violations regarding the export of Nvidia's most advanced Blackwell chips to China. On July 28, Jensen Huang flew to Washington and met with Commerce Secretary Lutnick. What the two discussed remains unknown to the outside world. What the investigation uncovered has not been disclosed by the Department of Commerce to this day. In the Taiwan case, the problem stemmed from a manager at Nvidia's Taiwan branch. On another track, a Chinese businesswoman went directly after Jensen Huang himself.
In early June 2024, Computex Taipei had just concluded. In a bar overlooking Taipei's nightscape sat several of Nvidia's major Asian clients, drinking. According to the recollection of an American data software company owner who was present, a long-haired woman said to everyone, "I bet I can call Jensen over"—Jensen being Jensen Huang's English first name! Before long, Jensen really showed up, bringing two Nvidia executives along. Nate Sander, one of the executives, later posted a group photo from that night on LinkedIn, where the woman was sitting right there. This woman, named Huang Le, goes by Alice in English; she is a Chinese citizen and has no family relation to Jensen Huang. Her online resume was remarkably polished: 4 years in media, 8 years in securities; had been a reporter for Hunan TV and CCTV, served as an assistant to the CEO of HSBC Private Banking, and was a vice president at CITIC Securities. But when the New York Post made inquiries, an executive at Hunan TV said they had never heard of her, and her reporter credentials could not be found on either television station's website. The New York Times likewise could not verify her true background.
What could be traced was another line of inquiry. On the Chinese private fund database Simuwang, there was a photo of her, listed as Executive Director and Fund Manager of Shanghai Hexi Investment Management Co. Hexi had invested in a Chinese gaming company called 7Road. The New York Times discovered that among 7Road's shareholders were the Chinese central government as well as several local governments. In 2023, 7Road spun off its Singapore subsidiary and renamed it Megas. This woman, who could summon Jensen Huang, was listed as Managing Director for the first 8 months; later company filings removed her title, but externally she continued to style herself as the company's CEO. A few weeks after that group photo in the bar, Megas began purchasing massive amounts of Nvidia equipment. Tech investors told The New York Times that Huang Le and those around her used her connection to Jensen Huang as a calling card to raise funds. On her personal social media accounts, she had also posted photos taken with Jensen Huang.
So where did the goods come from? Most came from a company called Aivres. Based in California, it is the U.S. subsidiary of Inspur, the Chinese server giant. In 2023, Inspur was placed on the U.S. Entity List—the trade blacklist—for supporting the Chinese military. Aivres, being an American company, procured directly from Nvidia, meaning on paper it counted as a transaction between U.S. domestic firms; once purchased, the goods were shipped to a subsidiary set up by Megas in Malaysia. Import records indicate that from June 2024 to February 2026, this Malaysian company purchased at least 4.8 billion dollars worth of AI equipment containing Nvidia chips. Megas built data centers in Southeast Asia and leased computing power to Chinese companies such as Alibaba.
At the end of 2024, officials from the U.S. Department of Commerce visited a data center in Malaysia. Expensive Nvidia equipment was still lying in boxes, not yet mounted on racks. In May 2025, Huang Le appeared in Taipei again. In a video, Jensen Huang was standing at the entrance of a restaurant chatting with Taiwanese journalists after dinner with a group of AI suppliers. Huang Le stood just a few steps behind him with a big smile, telling Bloomberg that there was no evidence of any chips being transshipped to China. It was during these few months that Bloomberg went through customs records in Malaysia and Indonesia, calculating that Magic had imported a total of about 136,000 Nvidia chips. However, Nvidia personnel visited its data centers and only found a few thousand Blackwell chips. Bloomberg also saw a material Magic presented to investors in 2024, written in Chinese: As of now, the largest Nvidia cloud partner compute cluster has been built in a specific region. Which region it was, the material did not specify. Bloomberg also found that a company in China was recruiting people near Shanghai under the same brand name, with job responsibilities involving the maintenance of U.S.-embargoed Nvidia chips.
Regarding this company, Nvidia's statement in 2025 was: the compliance team had checked it, and Megaspeed was completely owned by companies outside of China with no Chinese shareholders. Nvidia personnel had also visited the site multiple times and found no evidence of transshipment. In November, Nvidia stated that all chips dispatched to partners were where they were supposed to be. In December, it stated again that the vast majority of dispatched products had been located. Singapore police were also investigating the company, summoning Huang Le for questioning in 2025 and releasing her afterward. In February 2026, a data center company under private equity giant Bain Capital asked Megaspeed to move out of its server room in Malaysia.
On October 29, 2026, The New York Times published a report stating that U.S. intelligence agencies conducted electronic surveillance on Huang Le to investigate chip transshipment, only to discover that she was also passing intelligence to Beijing. In the surveillance records, the name of an American who was in contact with her was blacked out according to regulations. U.S. law stipulates that intelligence agencies cannot wiretap American citizens without a court order, and any American's name appearing in reports must be masked. Officials who need to can apply to unmask it—a process called identity unmasking. After unmasking, that American turned out to be Jensen Huang. What the White House was concerned about was that through Jensen Huang, she could get a feel for Trump's thoughts on the chip issue. The New York Times reported that Trump had received an intelligence briefing on this matter in 2025 but took no action. Officials at the time believed that Huang Le was gathering intelligence for Beijing. Later, some senior officials around Trump believed it was impossible for Jensen Huang to be completely unaware. When intelligence agencies discover an American targeted by foreign intelligence, they sometimes give the individual a warning known as a defensive briefing. By the time the report was published, Jensen Huang had not received any such briefing. The New York Times also admitted it could not clarify how close Huang Le and Jensen Huang actually were, nor could it clarify what intelligence Huang Le passed on or how useful it was to Beijing. The report added that companies associated with Huang Le were still continuing to buy Nvidia chips through intermediaries in 2026, and the surveillance was still ongoing. On the day the report came out, Jensen Huang gave an interview to Bloomberg. He said his interactions with Huang Le were completely normal and no different from his dealings with other Chinese clients and business executives, with nothing special at all. The U.S. government had never informed him of its suspicions regarding Huang Le, and by this time, Huang Le had already left Megaspeed.
Speaking of transshipments, Jensen Huang said that Nvidia had researched all deployed chips and accounted for every single one. An Nvidia spokesperson said that the transshipment allegations had been thoroughly investigated last year and proven false. Who conducted the investigation, Nvidia did not say. Meanwhile, the case involving the company Megaspeed has been transferred by the U.S. Department of Commerce to the Department of Justice. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said this was baseless speculation and a smear against China. What we can confirm now is that Huang Le was trying to get close to the boss of Nvidia, and this boss is currently lobbying Trump on behalf of Nvidia for deregulation.
Just eleven days after Trump took office for his second term, Huang met him at the White House on January 31, 2025. At that time, China's DeepSeek had just shaken the US stock market. The two discussed DeepSeek as well as chip export controls. Trump said afterward that the talks went very well and no promises were made to ease restrictions. In early April 2025, Trump hosted a dinner party at Mar-a-Lago in Florida, where the entry fee was $1 million per person, and Huang attended. According to a report by National Public Radio (NPR), after Nvidia committed to building new AI data centers in the United States, a restriction that the Trump administration had prepared to impose was put aside. This restriction targeted the H20 chip—a downgraded chip specially made by Nvidia for the Chinese market, which was also the most advanced AI chip that American companies could legally sell to China at the time. However, just a few days later, the wind shifted again. On April 9, the US government notified Nvidia that selling to China required applying for a license, and a few days later notified that this requirement was effective indefinitely. Nvidia estimated that it would incur costs of up to $5.5 billion as a result.
Huang did not stop. On July 10, he met Trump at the White House and then flew to Beijing. A few days later, Nvidia announced that the US government had informed the company that export license applications for the H20 would be approved. The US government had agreed to approve our applications to sell the H20 to China. On July 15, Commerce Secretary Lutnick revealed the trade deal behind this during an interview with Reuters. He said we incorporated this transaction into the internal trade agreement regarding magnets. The magnets he referred to were China's rare earth magnets. China would resume supplying rare earths to the US, and the US would greenlight Nvidia's downgraded chips. On August 6, Jensen Huang met Trump again. On August 8, the Commerce Department began issuing export licenses for the H20. At the same time, an additional condition was added: Nvidia and AMD agreed to hand over 15% of their revenue from chip sales to China to the US government. The US Constitution prohibits taxing exports, and legal experts at the time questioned whether this revenue cut might be unconstitutional.
On August 27, Nvidia released its quarterly financial report. Jensen Huang said during the earnings call that he estimated the Chinese market represented roughly a $50 billion opportunity for Nvidia this year. His reasoning remained unchanged: China has 50% of the world's artificial intelligence researchers; they have extraordinary universities, researchers, and enthusiasm. I believe it is wrong to forbid them from using American technology to research AI. In this narrative, he treated China strictly as a market, never mentioning what these chips would be used for once sold into China. To justify this reasoning, he made some controversial statements. In November 2025, he told the UK's *Financial Times* that China would win this AI race... A few hours later, Nvidia issued a statement on his behalf, backtracking to say that China was only behind the United States, and the US needed to run faster to win.
On December 8, Trump announced on social media platforms that he would allow Nvidia to sell the H200 chip—which is more advanced than the H20—to China. For approved customers, the US government would take a 25% cut. Reports said Xi Jinping reacted positively to this. Nvidia's most advanced Blackwell chips were still not allowed to be sold. In March 2026, Nvidia held its annual conference in San Jose, during the very week Supermicro's Charles Liang was arrested. Jensen Huang told reporters at the conference that Nvidia had received approval to sell the H200 to Chinese companies, had received many orders from customers, and the supply chain was restarting.
In May 2020, Trump visited Beijing, and Jensen Huang was not on the delegation list initially. That morning, Trump called him, thinking he was in Washington and could board Air Force One directly, but he was actually on the West Coast. Trump then told him to meet in Alaska. He flew to Alaska, boarded Air Force One, and went to Beijing. Of course, in Washington, some people were not buying it. In June, Senator Warren invited Huang to attend a hearing of the Senate Banking Committee to testify about Nvidia's business in China. Warren said she was concerned that American companies were focusing solely on making money, thereby undermining America's long-term security. She added that these controversial chips bound for China were actually being used by the military in China. On July 8, Jensen Huang received the National Medal of Science at the White House. Three weeks later, *The New York Times* published a report on Huang, which also mentioned that Huang's close ties with Trump had repeatedly stymied efforts to restrict Nvidia's overseas sales, stalling related investigations and proposed trade sanctions. These export licenses were approved one by one during the period when Jensen Huang repeatedly claimed there was no evidence. What the two senators asked the Commerce Department to investigate was precisely this matter.
At this point, logically speaking, Jensen Huang, who speaks up for China obtaining embargoed chips at the White House, should be well-received in Beijing. However, Beijing's attitude toward NVIDIA has been hot and cold. His dealings with Beijing have always been quite active. NVIDIA has nearly 4,000 employees in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen. Since 2024, he has visited these three cities every year before the Spring Festival to attend branch annual meetings, dance with employees, and eat hot pot and sign autographs on the streets. On April 14, 2025, the U.S. government notified NVIDIA that restrictions on the H20 would remain in effect indefinitely. Three days later, on the evening of April 17, Jensen Huang appeared at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, where he was received by the Vice Premier of the State Council in charge of the economy and Li Feng. Feng said that the Chinese market has always been a fertile ground for foreign investment and trade, adding that he is optimistic about China's economic prospects and is willing to continue to deepen his presence in the Chinese market. In July, he went to Beijing again to attend the China International Supply Chain Expo. At the opening ceremony, he wore a Tang suit and praised the innovation speed of Chinese researchers and entrepreneurs as super fast. Ren Hongbin, Chairman of the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade, met with him. He told the media that he is doing his best to serve the Chinese market.
However, there are times when Beijing is not so polite to NVIDIA. On July 31, 2025, half a month after news broke that the U.S. had cleared the H20, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) summoned NVIDIA. Wang Xingshan said that reports indicate NVIDIA's computing power chips have serious security issues, and demanded an explanation of whether the H20 sold to China carries the risk of vulnerabilities or backdoors, and requested the submission of supporting materials. The next day, August 1, the People's Daily posted a commentary on Weibo with a sentence in the title: "NVIDIA, how can I trust you?" The commentary stated that once chip vulnerabilities and backdoors are triggered, electric vehicles on highways could suddenly lose power, remote surgical equipment could suddenly go black, and mobile payments at supermarket checkouts could suddenly fail; once security is breached, everything else becomes zero. NVIDIA responded that its chips have no backdoors and no remote shutdown switches. On September 15, the State Administration for Market Regulation announced that after a preliminary investigation, NVIDIA had violated China's Anti-Monopoly Law and the additional conditions imposed by the Chinese side during the 2020 acquisition of the Israeli network equipment company Mellanox, and decided to launch a further investigation.
Two days later, on September 17, the Financial Times reported that the CAC had notified companies like ByteDance and Alibaba to stop testing and cancel orders for another NVIDIA China-specific chip, the RTX Pro 6000. During those days, Huang was accompanying Trump on a visit to the UK. He said he was disappointed, noting that the progress of human society is not a zero-sum game. During this same period, CCTV reported that the AI chip made by Alibaba's T-Head (Pingtouge) had surpassed NVIDIA's A800 and H20 in key indicators. In October, the Financial Times reported again that Chinese customs had dispatched inspectors to major ports to check imported data center hardware, first targeting the RTX Pro 6000, and later expanding to all advanced chips. Smuggled American chips were also to be blocked. While the U.S. investigates how chips flow into China, China itself is blocking these chips at its ports. That same month, Jensen Huang said in an interview that NVIDIA's market share in China had dropped from 95%. Up to this point, Beijing's attitude toward NVIDIA seemed very clear. But as the year turned, things changed again.
In late January 2026, Jensen Huang visited China for the annual meeting as usual. On the 7th, Reuters reported that Beijing had approved the import of over 400,000 A200 chips by ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent. Sources said the approval was granted during the week of Jensen Huang's visit to China. A condition attached to the approval was that for every A200 purchased, a proportional amount of domestic chips must also be bought. In May, following Trump's visit to China, Jensen Huang became a star on the streets of Beijing again. He was filmed drinking douzhi and eating zhajiangmian in a hutong, holding a cup of Mixue Bingcheng. He told reporters that China is one of the most remarkable economies in the world. In June, Beijing held the 4th China International Supply Chain Expo, and he sent a video message saying that China is an important global center for technology and industry, and that the engineers here are outstanding. Beijing had said the previous year that the chips might have backdoors and told big companies to cancel orders, but this year, when Jensen Huang arrived in China, they relaxed their stance and approved these chips without explaining whether the backdoor issue had been cleared up.
Every time Beijing cracks down, Nvidia loses a piece of its business in China, and these domestic chip manufacturers gain a piece. According to a Financial Times report in May 2026, Huawei's AI chip sales surged. However, these crackdowns also gave Jensen Huang more leverage in Washington. Hasn't he always told US policymakers that the tighter the restrictions, the more China will produce its own chips, and the market will be handed over to Huawei? Then dropping from 95% to zero is the number used in Chinese communities to persuade Washington. Beijing blocked it, not because Nvidia's chips weren't wanted, but because they wanted them on their own terms: large companies have to wait in line for approval, buying H200s requires bundling them with domestic chips, and when to open the floodgates is decided by Beijing. The second half of 2025, when Beijing cracked down the hardest, was precisely the half year when Washington was about to ease restrictions and reap the greatest rewards. Export licenses were obtained; in December, the H200 was cleared. Back and forth, Beijing got the chips, Nvidia got the orders, and the loser was the US export control strategy.
Let's return to the initial question. Just five days after the New York Times report was published, on November 3, the Financial Times reported again that Nvidia had begun asking its cloud computing partners to ensure that in future new contracts, at least 51% of their services must be sold to non-Chinese enterprises. This rule was verbally communicated by Nvidia's sales personnel and was not put into writing. Nvidia neither confirmed nor denied it, only saying that US AI infrastructure must be able to influence the AR race globally. This rule sounds like it is restricting China, but the ones scrambling for computing power worldwide are mainly the US and China. According to estimates by US research firm I based on customs records, in the first half of 2026, 78% of the world's newly added A computing power was installed locally in the US. US companies wanting computing power will build it at home rather than abroad, or rent it in Southeast Asia—those towering ones belong to a different group of people. People. The Financial Times reported last November that Alibaba's Qwen and ByteDance's Doubao were at least partially trained using Nvidia chips in data centers in Singapore and Malaysia. Earlier this month, China Wire reported that the top customer of a Singaporean company operating a data center in Johor, Malaysia, was a Chinese company. 51% to non-Chinese enterprises, translated into plain human language, means leaving 49% for Chinese enterprises.
Whether Huang Le is collecting intelligence for Beijing has no public evidence, and he himself has not been charged with any crimes. Yet in recent years, between the US and the CCP, he has repeatedly stood on the side Beijing wanted. When the US wanted to choke off chips, Jensen Huang went to lobby the White House, and successively got the A20 and H200 cleared. When the US investigated how chips were flowing into China, he said there was no evidence. And later? Cases involving Nvidia's Taiwan manager and Magazine one after another were uncovered. When a woman identified by US intelligence agencies as collecting intelligence for Beijing sat beside him, he said their interactions were completely normal. Nvidia has always said that doing this is to benefit the US. However, these loosenings and clearances have benefited Beijing the most.
Some might say Jensen Huang is doing all this purely for Nvidia's financial performance. The Chinese market, as he estimated himself, is a 50 billion dollar annual opportunity. According to Forbes estimates, his personal net worth exceeds 200 billion dollars, the bulk of which is Nvidia stock. The more Nvidia sells in China, the more he earns. Is he ultimately just doing business, or has he already taken Beijing's side? What do you think? Welcome to leave a message in the comments section. Well, that's all we're talking about today. If this episode has value for you, please like, turn on the notification bell, share, and subscribe to this channel. Friends who are able to do so are welcome to join as members to support our little [show]. I am Yaoyaojiang, who loves to think and values logic. See you next time.