A look at the alleged spy who had an affair with Nvidia’s CEO

0:00This episode is brought to you by Hard Lessons, a Morgan Stanley podcast. Iconic investors like Stan Druckenmiller, John Gray, and Rick Reeder break down calls that worked. I knew that this stock would go up for at least two or three years and go up a lot. Ones that didn't. I quite frankly thought the company could have reversed course. They didn't. And what they learned in between. When you buy everything and it goes up, it doesn't train you to be a great investor. It's these hard lessons that make all the difference. Listen to Hard Lessons wherever you get your podcasts.

0:32Good morning from the Financial Times. Today is Wednesday, November 11th, and this is your FT News Briefing. We're getting a clearer picture of just how big one of the most anticipated IPOs in Wall Street history will be. We're now looking at around about$1.4 trillion. It's going to be one of the biggest initial public offerings of all time. And a new inflation report has the Federal Reserve on its toes. It was probably enough to lock in a 25 basis point hike in the December meeting. Some Fed officials are floating going further. 50 basis point hike potentially on the table. Plus, we have more on the alleged Chinese spy who had an affair with NVIDIA's CEO.

1:14I'm Mark Filippino, and here's the news you need to start your day.

1:55investor, then the narrative is this. It's up four times from where this company was in February. It's near double what it was in May. And if you're more bearish on the company, then it's far below the expectations we had at the peak of the summer when investors thought that Anthropic could go public at$2 trillion or more. We're now looking at around about$1.4 trillion. That may edge up over the coming week. It's clearly a massive number. It's going to be one of the biggest initial public offerings of all time, but it is not quite as strong as investors were hoping, even as recently as a month ago.

2:30And this massive IPO is coming at a really interesting time when investors are pretty jittery about AI. The tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 is down around 10 % over the past month. How is that impacting the listing? Yeah, that has impacted the listing massively. So we have seen far more anxiety in the market over the last few weeks and months. that has come from a number of things, including the Democrat sweep in the midterms, including many elected officials who ran on a pretty anti-data center development ticket. And now that is compounded by Jensen Huang, the Nvidia boss's relationship with an alleged Chinese spy, which has just complicated things in the market and cast a bit of a shadow over this IPO as well.

3:14So these jitters are really having an impact on pricing. And the narrative that I've heard from investors in recent weeks has shifted pretty substantially from, you know, Anthropic will be the biggest IPO of all time and they can effectively price however they like, to now a very conservative approach, which is they should price low, raise as much as they can to fund their data center requirements and then not have to bother the equity markets ever again. So there's definitely been a shift in how this IPO is being framed. George, what's your takeaway from how this IPO has unfolded? Because it is certainly an interesting case study.

3:51Yeah, I think any fast-growing tech company IPO, there's going to be a huge amount of unpredictability. And what we are seeing with this current crop of companies is that these are very young companies. Anthropics are only five years old, but they have grown to a scale that we have never seen on the private markets. And that partly comes from the pace of development in AI. And so there's this kind of unprecedented challenge for public market investors of trying to put a valuation on a company that is at once a small startup and also one of the biggest companies in the world. And that uncertainty is reflected in the valuation range that investors and analysts have set on this.

4:29So Morningstar came out and said, this could be anything between a$500 billion company and a$3 trillion company. We know they have huge costs. They may have huge revenues, Goldman Sachs, who we should say is their lead underwriter, predict their revenues will get to$600 billion by 2030. But all of these things are subject to so much uncertainty that pricing a company is just a really, really challenging task. George Hammond is the FT's venture capital correspondent in San Francisco. Thank you, George. Thank you, Mark.

5:04The U.S. Commerce Department has delayed efforts to blacklist the company Megaspeed. It's one of NVIDIA's customers and linked to Alice Huang. She's an alleged Chinese spy who had an affair with NVIDIA's CEO, Jensen Huang. Apparently, several U.S. government agencies pushed for the Singapore-based Megaspeed to be included on the so-called entity list. That's a group of companies connected to China that the U.S. believes poses national security risks. But sources tell the FT that the Commerce Department, who is in charge of this list, refused to include Megaspeed. Now, the Commerce Department declined to talk about Megaspeed.

5:40They said that they had, quote, enforced aggressively across the board. But let's go back a little bit and focus on Alice Huang. She was listed as one of the directors of Megaspeed, and the U.S. government says she was recruited by China's state intelligence agency. The FT's Eleanor Alcott has been trying to understand more about her and her relationship with Jensen Wong. Hi, Eleanor. Hi, Mark. So how did you go about investigating Alice Wong's backstory? So when this story broke, I came to Shanghai because she has been a prominent tech investor here. We also understand that she was fundraising for this AI data center project in Southeast Asia out of a private members club here in the city.

6:22So that was kind of my first port of call. I visited this very lavish private members club in a very fashionable quarter and just asked the employees, you know, what was going on. We do know that she was running meetings at this club with investors to try and raise money for this project in Southeast Asia. What is more extraordinary is the fact that she was also conducting these business meetings with her purported husband, who has been fined multiple times for financial violations. He was present and involved in this despite an ongoing alleged affair with Jensen Huang. So we also know that Alice Huang was an executive at the company Megaspeed, which was one of Nvidia's customers.

7:14How does that all play into this? So Alice Huang has got connections in the data center and gaming world. What happens in 2023 is there's this really big business opportunity in Southeast Asia to set up data centers serving clients, Chinese clients who can't access the chips in China. So she gets involved with this project to turn this kind of dormant gaming company in Singapore into an AI data center business. So that's her original kind of pivot into the AI data center business. and thereafter the kind of connection to NVIDIA. Okay, let's bring it all together. What is her relationship with Jensen Huang?

7:59So Alice Huang met Jensen as a customer of NVIDIA. Megaspeed was introduced to NVIDIA and became kind of a key customer whilst touting their connections to Alibaba, which is a major Chinese internet company. So they were able to gain legitimacy with NVIDIA through their connections to Alibaba. We don't know precisely when she met Jensen Huang or when the relationship turned romantic, but there are pictures of them first together in the summer of 2024. And then we see more photos of them together in Hong Kong and in Shanghai and later in Taipei, which is probably the most known images now of them together at various dinners and bars.

8:45And we also have reporting that the MSS, that is the Chinese spy agency, contacted an individual connected to Alice Wang to ask about her business ties and connections to NVIDIA. Eleanor, you've gathered a ton of information since the story broke. What does this all tell us about NVIDIA? Yeah, I've been thinking about this. I think the big takeaway is that Jensen and NVIDIA for all of this time have been stressing that they have been doing their due diligence on their customers, that they've been doing compliance checks and deep dives into who their customers are. But what has emerged over the past few days from our reporting and from the reporting of many of our colleagues at different newspapers is just all of these massive red flags from Alice Wang and her business connections.

9:39So it does really raise questions about how seriously the company was going about those checks. It's the FT's Eleanor Alcott. Thank you so much, Eleanor. Thank you.

9:55it's looking more likely that the federal reserve could take more aggressive action at its meeting next month a top fed official has urged his fellow policymakers to consider raising interest rates by half a percentage point that's if u.s inflation doesn't start cooling off quickly and we now have some data showing that it's not the ft's u.s economics correspondent miles mccormick explains what was in yesterday's Consumer Price Index report? The inflation report basically showed that inflation eased in October, but not as much as markets were expecting. And it was a slightly unusual report in that we only had month-on-month figures rather than year-on-year figures, which we'd usually track because of the government shutdown last year, which meant that the Bureau of Labor Statistics was not actually able to collect data in October of 2025.

10:46The report led to the biggest sell-off of U.S. Treasuries in two years. The yield on the 10-year jumped above 5%. That's because investors are betting that the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates next month. It was probably enough to lock in a 25 basis point hike in the December meeting. Some Fed officials are floating going further. 50 basis point hike potentially on the table. That's still an outside shot. But the fact that it's being talked about says a lot about how folks on the Fed are feeling about inflation. The hawks are circling, as it were. Now, during the Fed's last meeting, officials opted to hold interest rates where they were.

11:28So it's pretty striking that a member of the Fed is now suggesting that the central bank could go from standing pat to a 50 basis point rise. Some economists think that it's pointing to the fact that perhaps they made a mistake not acting at the last meeting and need to make up for that by going doubly as strong the next time around. But it just basically underlines that the data they said they were waiting for to make their next move has come in worse effectively than folks were expecting. Core inflation has not dropped the way Wall Street thought it would. And all the signs are pointing to the Fed needing to take action when it meets next month.

12:13That's the FT's U.S. economics correspondent, Miles McCormick.

12:22How would Germany use its long-range missiles in a conflict with Russia? Well, that's what France wants to know. And it's pressuring Berlin to shed some light on the topic. Paris says that if Germany doesn't, it could accidentally drag Europe into a nuclear war. Basically, France wants Germany to adopt part of its nuclear strategy, the bit related to weapons capable of launching deep precision strikes. That's according to six people familiar with the discussions. One French official warned that it's possible to attack a Russian target with a conventional weapon, but still get a nuclear response.

12:54In the background, Germany, along with several other countries, is significantly scaling up its arsenal of far-reaching weapons.

13:06You can read more on all these stories for free when you click the links in our show notes. This has been your daily FT News Briefing. Check back tomorrow for the latest news from the Financial Times.

13:30For years, credit scores were generated with just a snapshot. A snapshot that left millions of people out of the picture. So VantageScore is modernizing the credit score. VantageScore uses 400 % more credit report and alternative data than legacy models, bringing more people into the credit economy. Like 5 million more mortgage-eligible people. Banks win and francs win. Lenders win and so do Lindas. When you build credit scores the right way, everybody wins. Get started at VantageScore.com. Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, email, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer.

14:08With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at goo.gle slash workspace with Gemini. That's goo.gle slash workspace with Gemini.