History of the honeytrap: How spies have been using sex to obtain state secrets for decades

Résumé détaillé

Jensen Huang’s ousting from Nvidia plunged the $4 trillion company into uncertainty – but it is not the first time that foreign intelligence has brought down powerful people by seduction

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Jensen Huang is to step down as CEO of Nvidia after bombshell revelations that he had an affair with a businesswoman accused of being a Chinese spy.

Huang’s exit plunges a $4 trillion company into uncertainty and threatens to disrupt a complex AI ecosystem that has long relied on the world’s most valuable company to scale.

At the eye of the storm is Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le, who US intelligence officials believe was funnelling information to Beijing as she courted Nvidia’s CEO.

China denies allegations of corporate espionage as a “smear campaign”. But Washington is rattled, having spent years trying to keep Beijing from the secrets to rival its hold on cutting-edge AI technology.

The Nvidia spy scandal is only the latest in a long-running saga of alleged “honeytrap” plots, whereby rival states exploit “vulnerabilities” like sexual relationships for strategic gain.

Taiwanese-American engineer Jen-Hsun "Jensen" Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and oversaw its growth from making graphics processing units (GPUs) with $40,000 in the bank to the world’s most valuable tech company since 2025.

For years, Nvidia was best known to gamers chasing top-tier graphics. But its chips’ ability to perform many calculations at once has made them the oil of the AI boom and a strategic prize in the US-China race to dominate the technology.

And then, late last year, US authorities began investigating Nvidia client Megaspeed over suspicions that it was helping divert advanced AI chips to China. According to The New York Times, officials suspected that former managing director Alice Huang, who is not related to Jensen, was feeding information directly to Beijing on how to gain access to the chips.

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