Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.), the chairperson of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has said that he will issue a subpoena to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang if he does not respond to the committee’s request to meet with them on November 18 by Wednesday, November 11, according to ABC News. The House invited him to a “joint, closed-door briefing” with the heads of the House committees on China, Foreign Affairs, and Intelligence, and that they will focus on his company’s “security protocols against foreign adversary espionage.”
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Congress first called the embattled CEO on November 7, a few days after rumors started circulating about Huang’s “closeness” to a particular Chinese executive suspected of passing information to Chinese intelligence. The following day, Nvidia released a statement from Jensen admitting to an affair with Megaspeed executive Alice Huang, apologizing for his unfaithfulness, while the company’s board of directors confirmed it will launch an independent investigation regarding the allegations that the CEO has been specifically targeted by China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS). Aside from having to face Congress, Jensen Huang is also reportedly being looked into by the FBI.
It remains unclear whether Jensen Huang was targeted by intelligence agencies, but he came into prominence with the AI boom that was arguably fueled by Nvidia’s AI chips. This led to the AI race as we know it today, with the U.S. taking steps to delay China’s advancement for fears that it will use the technology for military purposes. We also don’t know if Huang Le or Alice Huang is actually a Chinese spy or an “innocent” bystander caught in a web of accusations. And, even if she did work with the MSS, the question remains as to whether she specifically targeted the Nvidia CEO or whether Chinese intelligence discovered their indiscretion and used that as a convenient tool for blackmail to extract information from her.
However, former CIA agent Darrel Blocker told ABC News that the authorities should just focus on Jensen. “I think that the biggest concern is that the focus or overfocus on just Jensen Huang and Nvidia risks losing sight of the fact that other people have been targeted by the Chinese. Are they talking to the engineers? Are they talking to other people who might have even more access than even the CEO has? So, this focus should not be singular; it should include everyone in the company, and quite frankly, every tech company out there should be looking at all the contacts that their officers and employees have.”
“It’s definitely not a one-time thing. When you run a trillion-dollar company, you know that you have a bullseye on your back; whether it’s from competition or rather from nation-states, so this is absolutely not a one-off. Jensen Huang is not the only person at Nvidia that has access to the crown jewels, so I would be looking at the other people in terms of the access that they enjoy and their proximity to Chinese nationals.”
