What suspected spy Alice Huang could have extracted during pillow talk with Nvidia boss and how China could use it

Alleged Chinese spy Alice Huang may have extracted key details on Nvidia’s products and thoughts on President Trump’s AI stance during “pillow talk” with CEO Jensen Huang, experts said.Alice, also known as Huang Le, has been identified at the center of Nvidia boss’ affair, with US officials accusing her of being an asset for China’s feared spy agency, the Ministry of State Security (MSS).Nicholas Eftimiades, a retired US senior intelligence officer and author of “Chinese Espionage Operations and Tactics,” claimed Alice’s history as a businesswoman in the tech field likely helped her get close to Jensen to get the information about Nvidia, the backbone of America’s AI boom.“This is pillow talk,” said Eftimiades.“They have a mutual interest of things to talk about — he might say, ‘Yeah, no, I can’t get this passed the board,’ or, ‘Yeah I can get this passed.’“That let’s China focus and say, ‘OK now we know who our friends are and now we know who our enemies are,’” Eftimiades added.Jensen also has a close relationship with Trump, and experts say that would have made him a key target as well to get an understanding of where the president’s stance was on tech exports or anything else. But because of Huang’s status as co-founder of the second largest company in the world and ally of Trump, Alice’s alleged approach would have needed a softer touch to create an atmosphere of influence. “It’s hard for me to imagine someone of his stature getting a ‘Here is what you should tell President Trump,’” said Peter Mattis, co-author of Chinese Communist Espionage: An Intelligence Primer.“She was mostly like introducing him to people in China to shape what he understood about what was taking place,” he added.

 Another layer to the relationship is that Jensen Huang was in the business to sell chips — and he was on record as being skeptical or critical of export regulations to China for years, including before his...