Crabgrass learned from today's post at EmptyWheel of a national security concern for an affair between Jensen Huang, the man behind Nvidia, and an Alice Huang of Singapore's Megaspeed data farm builder in multiple Asian locations. The intelligence community is concerned. The claim by Nvidia is no unauthorized Nvidia state-of-the-art chips reached mainland China and no trade secret compromise ensued despite the personal interactions. .

 EmptyWheel link: https://emptywheel.net/2026/11/09/honey-trap-huang/?unapproved=1167087&moderation-hash=e49f585abe7270725c7fcb84be25b3d7#comment-1167087

Readers may access that, but Crabgrass notes an Israeli outlet's reporting: https://www.israelhayom.com/2026/11/08/jensen-huang-nvidia-megaspeed-intelligence-report/, quoting in part:

Congress demands answers from Nvidia's Jensen Huang over romance with suspected Chinese agent

US intelligence suspects Alice Huang of Singapore's Megaspeed was recruited by China's MSS to influence AI chip export policy. House committee chairs have set November 18 for a closed-door briefing.

by  Shachar Shapiro

Published on  11-08-2026 09:15

Last modified: 11-08-2026 13:32

According to an internal intelligence document circulated to senior officials in the administration of President Donald Trump, the US intelligence community has concluded that Huang had a romantic relationship with Alice Huang (no family relation), a senior executive at the Singapore technology company Megaspeed. The heavy intelligence suspicion is that Alice Huang was recruited by the MSS, China's Ministry of State Security (Beijing's main intelligence and espionage agency), in order to carry out a targeted intelligence-gathering operation around the Nvidia CEO and to influence policy on exporting advanced chips to China.

The relationship between the two quickly crossed professional boundaries and developed into a personal relationship that continued under close electronic and physical surveillance by US intelligence agencies for more than a year.  

 [...] Megaspeed, where Alice Huang is employed, is not an unknown entity to Nvidia. The company operates as an official cloud partner that buys enormous quantities of equipment and graphics processing units (GPUs) from the American company and rents out computing power to AI development firms around the world.

But in recent months, Megaspeed has been under intense scrutiny from US law enforcement and intelligence officials, on suspicion that it operates as a conduit for smuggling advanced AI chips into China, in blatant circumvention of American export restrictions. According to the reports, intelligence agencies identified that the Chinese tried to exploit the closeness between the pair to obtain sensitive technological information about next-generation processors, and even to apply pressure to persuade Nvidia to keep supplying premium chips to the Chinese market.

 The timing of the report's disclosure has set off a major political storm in Washington. The intelligence document was passed to the administration shortly before the summit meeting between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, and in the wake of the US midterm election results, congressional leaders from both parties are now demanding immediate answers.

 In the world of intelligence, a "honey trap" is a classic espionage tactic in which intelligence agencies use romantic or sexual relationships to get close to key figures, build trust with them, extract sensitive information from them or blackmail them. In Nvidia's case, the target is not traditional military secrets – but AI chips. China lags behind the United States technologically in semiconductors, and American law prohibits selling it the most powerful chips (such as the H100 and H200 series).

Without those processors, China cannot train language models that would compete with the West or develop AI-based weapons systems. For that reason, any personal access to the person who holds the keys to the global chip industry is worth billions of dollars to Chinese intelligence.

 Intelligence investigations revealed the precise path by which Megaspeed circumvented trade restrictions. The company built giant server farms across Southeast Asia and rented their computing power directly to the Chinese tech giant Alibaba – which allowed Chinese companies to run advanced models without physically purchasing the chips.

Moreover, a mapping of the investor network behind Megaspeed in Shanghai and Zhejiang uncovered direct financial ties to CETC, one of the giants among technology and electronics manufacturers for China's military. Behind the operation stands the MSS, led by Minister Chen Yixin, who oversees hundreds of thousands of agents and has designated the top ranks of the Western silicon industry as a top-priority intelligence target.

To understand why Chinese intelligence invested such heavy resources around a single person, one has to look at the engineering gap that has opened between the powers. Beijing's strategic goal of becoming the global AI leader by 2030 is crashing against Nvidia's silicon supremacy. The current flagship processor from the Blackwell generation, the GB300, delivers about 7,500 teraflops (trillion operations per second), measured in FP4 calculations, while drawing only 1,400 watts. The company's next-generation platform, Rubin, is expected to catapult that figure to 66,700 teraflops.

By contrast, the most advanced alternatives from China's Huawei, the Ascend 910C series and the new Ascend 950 processors, lag behind Nvidia by roughly three to four years. Because of the Western boycott on advanced lithography machines (EUV) and a shortage of HBM (high-bandwidth memory) components, the Chinese have been forced to link hundreds of processors in giant arrays such as the CloudMatrix 384 in order to train local models such as DeepSeek and Qwen.

 But the energy cost is unbearable. A single Huawei server rack draws about 559 kilowatts, compared with only 120 kilowatts in Nvidia's equivalent NVL72 system. Add to that Nvidia's absolute control of the CUDA development environment, since switching from it to China's CANN environment consumes months of grueling work and hurts efficiency, and it is clear why Beijing prefers to obtain the original by any means.

 Megaspeed is a multi-billion dollar customer of Nvidia, so it got prime customer attention independent of Jensen Huang's personal love affair.

The House Select Committee on China, together with the Foreign Affairs and Intelligence committees, sent Huang an official letter demanding that he appear for a confidential closed-door briefing, to explain his contacts with Alice Huang and the security protocols meant to protect the company from espionage by foreign powers.

The chairs of the House committees on China, foreign affairs and intelligence have already set an official date. Huang is required to appear for the confidential briefing on Capitol Hill on November 18, where he will be asked to provide a detailed answer about the information disclosed to Alice Huang and the level of security that prevents foreign spies from penetrating the company's production lines and chip plans.

At the same time, Democratic Senator Chris Coons, who is expected to chair the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, announced that he will open a comprehensive investigation into what he described as "the insane connection between the Trump administration, Chinese spies and the AI billionaires."

That says the situation will be sensationalized with finger pointing between the two stranglehold parties.

[...] The mounting public pressure and the anger of congressional lawmakers have already exacted an immediate toll on policy. The affair upended the plans and completely halted the government initiative formulated earlier this year between Huang and Trump, which was meant to allow Nvidia to keep selling customized H200 chips to the Chinese market in exchange for the US government taking a 25% cut. [...]

This story did not break public until days ago when NYT published. Trump had notice of intelligence when most recently meeting Xi, but if earlier, Crabgrasss found no report of it. It appears Nvidia only in the last few days was given notice of intelligence concern over the relationship, and the board is launching its own investigation with outside counsel. 

Why now, and how independent of political scheming of the Trump administration are current intelligence agencies? The particular agency which broke the story, giving Nvidia its first official government notice, is not identified, per Crabgrass reading, so far. The timing is interesting.

Crabgrass speculates the timing and its market effect will delay Anthropic's planned IPO, and shake market nerves. Timed now, where the AI bubble may be poised to break and after Musk got his SpaceX IPO first and a big money market - may well have been a carefully planned and timed release. After the blue wave, give them the AI bubble splat on their congressional watch being possible Trumpian thinking. Or not? It is guesswork based on circumstantial inference.

What is unclear, is whether anything of actual intelligence and market leadership value was compromised.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/11/08/nvidia-jensen-huang-email-board-of-directors-statement.html presents Huang's memo to Nvidia employees and Nvidia's board memo - details are there.

https://emeraldbook.org/news/nov-0826-3/  a site not generally known to Crabgrass does have its own published story interstitialy different from that quoted above. Between the two, facts are laid out.

search = alice hunag security risk -- shows the story has widespread reporting, with Crabgrass reading and reporting NOT trying to exhaustively read and report all coverage. Readers can do their own searching.

________________UPDATE______________

https://foreignaffairs.house.gov/news/press-releases/chairmen-mast-moolenaar-and-crawford-request-jensen-huang-brief-congress-on-link-to-chinese-intelligence-asset 

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/11/05/nvidia-jensen-huang-china-spy-congress.html 

FURTHER:  It might just be me, but I infer the bbc deliberately ran this leading image in its report, as a reminder of the infamous Al Franken grope photo. I cannot believe it coincidence. It was deliberate.

Guardian does truth = "The victories were a clear rebuke of Trump’s politics, but also a referendum on the Democratic party’s own centrism that is complicit in the violence of masked men hunting immigrants, the funding of a genocide and the denial of healthcare to citizens of the world’s wealthiest country. Constants do not produce change. It was a Democratic party committed to “centrism” that lost the House in 2022. A promise to maintain the status quo did not win Kamala Harris the 2024 presidency. And while some want to point to centrist victories in this blue wave, what is newsworthy is how Democratic politics have, in the last two years, shifted towards progressives and socialists, in campaigns powered by people and their small donations rather than big corporations and their money."

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/nov/08/democratic-party-midterm-election-centrism 

The post is headlined via two early paragraphs of the Guardian's item, run together.

More from Guardian's analysis -

Take the wins of eight card-carrying democratic socialists who are entering the House of Representatives, three of whom – Avila Chevalier, Melat Kiros and Donavan McKinney – are unseating establishment candidates to do so. Avila Chevalier, who was an immigration organizer and part of the student encampment, ran because her opponent, Adriano Espaillat, refused to meet with Mahmoud Khalil’s family when he was abducted by ICE and also refused to call for the agency’s abolition.

Their victories were facilitated by Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral win in New York last year. But what paved the way for him, and them, I have argued, was the pro-Palestine movement that put their bodies on the line and that made it so that most Democrats are sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.

It is a shift that the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) itself recognized when it declared that it will no longer endorse candidates or give campaign contributions; that its money was now toxic and served as a flag to Democratic voters not to support their candidates.

Senators-elect Troy Jackson and El-Sayed – who are progressive, but not DSA members – have called what’s happening in Palestine a “genocide” and won contentious competitions doing so in Maine and Michigan respectively. James Talarico in Texas said “God is screaming at all of us in Gaza as we speak”.

A similar thing happened with regards to other social movements. Today 77% of Democrats (and half of all Americans) support abolishing Immigration, Customs and Enforcement (ICE), a position incredibly unpopular in the last two decades that activists have been organizing for it.

Democrats, who have long been in bed with tech, ran against AI datacenters, pushed by organizers who emphasized their destruction of the environment, water supply and social effects on everything from student learning, theft of intellectual property, to the creation of nonconsensual porn.

But these problems, while shaping candidate platforms, were secondary to economic issues for most voters. Gallup polling just before the election showed healthcare (68%) as the number one issue that registered Democrats found “extremely important”. An earlier poll from You-Gov indicates what they want: a staggering 85% of Democrats support Medicare for All.

The same Gallup poll showed that for Democratic voters it’s not just the economy that’s the top concern for their vote, but specifically “income and wealth distribution” (65%) over and above gas prices (53%). Said in a different way it’s not just “affordability” that people want, it’s affordability through justice and social programming – it’s redistribution ie socialist policy.

The blue wave is cause for celebration – the Democratic party is in a two party system, the only alternative we currently have to a Republican party that has gotten unfathomably brutal, that wears white supremacy like a crown.

However, the Democratic party too is a part of the same political machinery that has funded ICE administration after administration. That has funded the genocide in Gaza. That did not succeed in enshrining healthcare for all, or cancelling student debt. That has not brought us the progressive, socialist policy that Americans crave. And it is unclear, despite this pressure from voters, that the party is going to do differently this time.

Read the rest at the link given at the top of this post.

 

 

AIPAC on the ropes, but not knocked out. Not with two of its top money takers being Hakim Jeffries and Schumer. Is there to be a knockout punch, or what? Business as usual as a way to piss away the value of a blue shift, by dishonoring progress and saying "as usual" is okay and what the big donors want - is that the promise of a new day or of the old way? More of the same? Later, we trade places again, etc.?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/oct/22/aipac-politics-endorsements-israel 

Aipac, which only launched its political action committee and started endorsing candidates three cycles ago, is hardly getting out of US elections. It pledged to maintain the work of its deep-pocketed Super Pac, United Democracy Project, and to continue to funnel millions of dollars to prop up pro-Israel candidates through individual donors and Aipac members. The shift in strategy was a sign it was adapting to a changing political landscape, not that it was giving up its efforts to shape it.

“Historically, AIPAC sustained an aura of invincibility that ensured it won most battles by walkover – if you are perceived as invincible, the other side doesn’t even bother to fight you,” the political analyst Trita Parsi wrote. “Rather than invincibility, AIPAC’s name now carries such toxicity that the group doesn’t want its own name on its political donations.”

Aipac did not respond to a request for comment. On Wednesday, the New York Times reported that Aipac, which normally backs Democrats, was planning to give as much as $9m to a Pac supporting Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers over Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan. The group had already spent $32m seeking to defeat El-Sayed, an outspoken critic of Israel, in the primaries.

But the announcement that it would stop directly backing candidates going forward was seen as tacit recognition that Aipac’s open support risked hurting pro-Israel candidates more than it helped them.

“Through this shift, AIPAC openly admitted that their brand has become toxic in the political world,” Beth Miller, political director of Jewish Voice for Peace Action, one of Aipac’s most vocal critics, said. “Fewer and fewer candidates are willing to be publicly affiliated with this extremist, warmongering group. This is a clear signal: being pro-genocide is bad politics and bad policy.”

In a letter from Aipac to members first reported on by Jewish Insider, the group’s leadership seemed to acknowledge that its once formidable power in US elections had suffered as more candidates openly distanced themselves from Israel and from the group itself. In the letter, they noted that the 2026 election was “one of the most challenging environments in recent memory” for the group and predicted that the “challenges we are confronting will continue to grow in the years ahead.”

“To win the fight for the future of the country and the U.S.-Israel alliance, we must build a more strategic, consequential, and nimble political operation,” they wrote. “The only tactic we’re married to is the most effective one.”

While Aipac boasted that it helped 290 candidates this election cycle, leading to the defeat of 29 candidates it described as “anti-Israel”, the group has also suffered major blows – including in Michigan and New Jersey. More than a dozen candidates who took Aipac contributions in the past have since publicly distanced themselves from the group, and New York congressman Pat Ryan announced last week that he would return nearly $250,000 from the group, the latest of several elected officials to return Aipac funds or say they would turn it down.

Dion Nissenbaum, a journalist whose documentary on Aipac was published this week, featuring interviews with former Aipac insiders, told the Guardian that the announcement appeared to be the “first real admission from Aipac that their campaign strategy has backfired”.

Still, he warned, “if Aipac’s super PAC – the main source of its campaign donations – is going to keep operating, it may be an attempt to reinvent itself without ceding the battlefield.”

That is more than enough of the item to get the drift. People voted as if genocide and ethnic cleansing was noticed and met with disapproval. The Guardian item continues, and readers have the link at the top of this post. An enduring policy of ongoing land theft and extreme hostility against those whose land is to be expropriated is not one easy to love. AIPAC is seeing this in real time, and not quitting its throwing its weight around as much as taking a breather to reevaluate its ways and means.

In short - it ain't going away. And, not in the article by name, it still owns Jeffries and Schumer.

With those as Dem leaders, AIPAC can feel comfortable in catching its breath.

 

 

Childish tantrum? Or ---Was it Stephen Miller given the Chief of Staff position because Greg Bovino turned it down? Dracula has been centuries dead, so not a job candidate. It narrows the field when you speculate what Trump wanted after Wiles was efficient, even with the bucket of stuff she'd had to work with.

Stephen Miller is nobody's view of a level efficient honest non-ideologue to be tasked with a difficult job.

Stephen Miller is Trump's way of saying Fuck You to the voting public saying it to him.

Could he have named a more in-your-face individual (JD having VP and not willing to change).

Marco? Figure ten reasons for Miller, not Marco, besides SecState to Staff being a down shift.

What is true, is wrapping an explanation around Stephen Miller as Staff head, and how we all can feel about that, are separate things. To logically analyze a visceral howl to everyone as if having any more to it than action - reaction.

It is primordial brain stem reaction within Trump, to Trump being told voting people hate Trump - Trump and administration, Trump and family. Trump and JD. Trump and Hegseth. Trump and greed. Trump and unmatched corruption, crypto and non-crypto.

You reject me, I hand you Steven Miller, your rejecting me earned that, so go fuck off.

Something like that is afoot. It cannot be Trump seeing merit in Miller. Who could do that?

Miller is the biggest possible insult Trump could imagine to an electorate that said Trump = awful, Then, "I'll show you awful, Miller, come here," being the response. A sick underlying logic to it that Trump being Trump means Miller being elevated to a greater public view, as if a zoo is being remodeled. 

Bessent and Miller, so there! 

_______________UPDATE_______________ 

search = Steven miller as Trump revenge against voters --- three returned items

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/house-gop-erupts-at-stephen-miller-as-trump-elevates-him-after-midterm-massacre-megalomaniac/ar-AA2gX72J 

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/nov/07/trump-stephen-miller-midterms 

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/stephen-miller-trump-chief-of-staff-reaction-b3080823.html 

 If you dislike the Crabgrass understandings, write your own.

 

JD did that long tweet saying Republicans suffered over the Iran war, it was the Iran war, only the Iran war, no other problems. Democracy Now! notes otherwise. And use the "c word."

 

Corruption Watchdog: Voters "Have Eyes" & Saw Trump "Enriching Himself" at Their Expense

 And the Trump family, him and his offspring, were not alone. The billionaires getting their tax and business breaks shift the burden of financing the government on the little guys, who see it as that immediately but felt powerless to fight it. Candidates ran saying they had fight in them. Now the problem will be the Dem establishment who were in bed with the Repubs in serving the donor rich, and will want to continue business as usual. That is why Schumer has to go. That is what JD hoped to sweep under the carpet. Or choose a parallel cliche.

The establishment Dems, voicing but not doing will be the big stumbling block progressives will face.

It is unclear if there will be an answer since there are more establishment types than progressives, so numbers stand against good government actually taking root.

Watch the video.

And note, JD is trying to hide the truth under a hat. And playing the money in politics game is a Schumer thing also. 

UPDATE: Make it clear. Schumer is into the money to get candidates elected. Not like Trump and offspring, in it to enrich themselves, first, the campaigning wins second. But Schumer is a bit too indiscriminate about whose money he takes and what's expected in return. It has to be made squeaky clean or it remains a failed system overly favorable to the wealthy and their class warfare against the rest. 

And then there is the Israel bias, with a blind eye to how the Israelis conduct themselves. That cannot be accepted. 

 

 

It is widely reported, Stephen Miller will from now on be Trump's Chief of Staff. Vomit worthy individual gets promotion is an alternate phrasing

 It is on X. Wiles out. Stephen Miller to be Trump's Chief of Staff. JD is supportive.

 https://x.com/JDVance/status/2118789426813821141

 

Don't just say it. Do it. Watch out for the door knob.

 https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/minnesota-gop-senate-candidate-denied-171314543.html

"A CNN KFile review found that, in the years before launching her Senate campaign, in tweets and on her podcast, Tafoya repeatedly said she planned to leave Minnesota," the network reported. "At times she described Minnesota in sharply negative terms because of its politics, while often identifying herself as a part-time Floridian and praising that state as a model of conservative governance.

"In just the past three years," the report continued, "Tafoya told followers at least four separate times that she planned to leave the state."

Better without her. Sooner the better. The DC fat job exit door is closed. What's holding things up?