U.S. officials have reportedly determined that Alice Huang, a Chinese citizen and top executive at the Singapore-based data center company Megaspeed, is a Chinese intelligence asset who had developed a close relationship with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and has been funneling information to Beijing.
The post Report: China Used Female Agent to Spy on Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang appeared first on Breitbart.
Europe’s efforts to establish greater control over artificial intelligence technology are entering a new phase as the EUROPA consortium, led by Italian company Domyn, advances plans to develop one of the continent’s largest open-source AI models.
The initiative, supported by the European Commission and European high-performance computing infrastructure, aims to create an advanced artificial intelligence system capable of competing with models developed by leading American and Chinese companies.
Domyn chief executive Uljan Sharka told the Financial Times on 29 October that Europe possesses the technological resources and industrial expertise required to compete in advanced AI development.
However, he also identified two obstacles: the need for greater investment and the difficulty of persuading European businesses to adopt domestically developed systems.
These challenges extend beyond the development of a single language model.
They concern whether Europe can establish a commercially sustainable AI industry while reducing dependence on technology providers headquartered outside the EU.
The European Commission selected EUROPA in June 2026 as the winner of its Frontier AI Grand Challenge.
The competition, launched in February, was designed to support the development of a European general-purpose AI model with more than 400 billion parameters.
EUROPA’s planned model is expected to contain approximately 500 billion parameters and support all 24 official EU languages.
The consortium brings together Domyn and Germany’s Fraunhofer research organisation, including the Fraunhofer IAIS and IIS institutes.
Its work will rely on the EuroHPC network of European supercomputers.
Under the competition arrangements, the winning consortium can obtain access to as much as 2.5 per cent of EuroHPC’s total computing capacity for one year.
This allocation is intended to address one of the largest barriers to advanced AI development: the enormous computing resources required to train models at this scale.
The final system is intended to be released under an open-source licence, allowing organisations to inspect, adapt and deploy the technology.
Nevertheless, parameter count alone does not demonstrate that a model is competitive.
Its actual performance will depend on training data, architecture, computational efficiency, evaluation results and the ability to perform reliably across different tasks.
One of EUROPA’s distinguishing objectives is its coverage of all official EU languages.
The commercial AI market has historically been dominated by models developed primarily for English-language applications, although leading international systems increasingly support multiple languages.
For Europe, linguistic capability has particular relevance to public administration, legal services, education and cross-border business.
A model designed specifically for the European market could potentially support specialised applications involving national legislation, administrative procedures and technical terminology.
However, multilingual availability will need to be assessed against measurable performance standards.
A system capable of producing fluent responses in a particular language is not necessarily equally reliable when interpreting specialised legal or scientific information.
The consortium will therefore need to demonstrate that linguistic coverage translates into practical capabilities rather than remaining principally a technical specification.
The EUROPA project forms part of a wider effort to use European publicly supported computing infrastructure for commercial and scientific AI development.
The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking has invested in systems intended to provide advanced computing resources to researchers, businesses and public institutions.
Additional AI-focused infrastructure is being developed through the EU’s network of AI factories.
These facilities are intended to make specialised computing capacity available to organisations that would otherwise face considerable costs when developing or adapting AI systems.
However, infrastructure ownership does not necessarily provide complete technological independence.
European supercomputing projects continue to rely on internationally sourced semiconductor technology and specialised software.
Domyn itself has described a partnership with the American technology company Nvidia in its previous model-development work.
Consequently, European AI sovereignty is better understood as a question of control over important technological capabilities than complete separation from international supply chains.
On 20 October, Domyn announced the initial release of Domyn Edge, a separate AI model containing four billion parameters.
According to the company’s technical announcement, the system was trained from scratch using approximately 13 trillion tokens on Europe’s Leonardo supercomputer.
Domyn has committed to making the model’s weights, training code, intermediate checkpoints and datasets available under open licences.
This approach is intended to improve reproducibility and allow external developers to examine how the model was constructed.
Domyn Edge is substantially smaller than the planned EUROPA system and should not be confused with it.
Nevertheless, the project provides an example of the company’s approach to developing AI models using European computing infrastructure.
The EU has already established an extensive regulatory framework for artificial intelligence through the AI Act.
However, legislation governing the development and deployment of AI does not, by itself, create a competitive domestic technology industry.
Europe faces competition from American companies with substantial private investment, established cloud platforms and access to large commercial markets.
Chinese developers have also expanded their capabilities, including in open-weight AI systems.
EUROPA’s commercial prospects will therefore depend on more than technical performance.
European businesses must be willing to integrate the resulting technology into their operations, while developers will require dependable access to computing infrastructure and support services.
There is also the question of whether European institutions themselves will adopt domestically developed AI systems where they meet relevant security and performance requirements.
Without sufficient demand, even a technically successful model could struggle to establish a sustainable ecosystem.
Domyn has indicated that it aims to release EUROPA during 2027, although public statements have differed over the precise timetable.
The company’s leadership has discussed a June target, while an earlier technical announcement referred to the second half of 2027.
The immediate challenge is completing development and demonstrating that the model can compete on performance, reliability and cost.
The longer-term challenge concerns adoption.
If European businesses and public institutions continue relying predominantly on foreign technology, access to an advanced European alternative may have only a limited effect on the market.
Conversely, a competitive and widely adopted open-source model could offer organisations greater control over deployment, customisation and sensitive information.
EUROPA is therefore more than a publicly supported technology experiment.
It is a test of whether Europe can convert research institutions, computing infrastructure and industrial expertise into AI products capable of competing in the international market.
The outcome will depend not simply on whether Europe can build an advanced model, but on whether organisations consider it sufficiently capable and economical to use.
Donald Trump sapeva che il ceo di Nvidia fosse spiato da una donna cinese da circa un anno, ma non ha fatto niente. A rivelarlo è il New York Times, in una lunga inchiesta a sei firme, secondo cui Jensen Huang sarebbe stato affiancato dall’omonima (o quasi) Alice Huang, nota anche come Huang Le. Si spacciava come alta dirigente della società di data center Megaspeed, che ha sede a Singapore, anche se non è chiarissimo il suo ruolo nell’azienda. In realtà lavorava per conto della Cina, a cui passava importanti informazioni. Non solo. Alice Huang sarebbe stata scoperta perché attenzionata per un’altra indagine, che la vede spedire a Pechino chip altamente avanzati di Nvidia. Trump, pur essendone a conoscenza, non ha però mosso un dito. Una scelta strategica, per evitare di mettere a repentaglio le attività commerciali che il colosso tecnologico tiene in Cina e di andare allo scontro con Xi Jinping.
Il problema è che, da quanto scrive il Nyt, neanche Huang sarebbe stato messo al corrente. Per cui potrebbe non avere avuto filtri con la dirigente di Megaspeed, anche se da Nvidia fanno sapere che “le interazioni non sono insolite né inaspettate. Gli incontri con i clienti fanno parte del lavoro di un ceo. Jensen parla con migliaia di dirigenti di aziende clienti ogni anno”. L’azienda d’altronde compra chip tramite la sua filiale statunitense Inspur, finita nella black list del governo americano per aver rivenduto tecnologia militare alla Cina. Megaspeed, tra il 2024 (quando è cominciata l’indagine) e febbraio 2026 ha acquistato almeno 4,8 miliardi di dollari di apparecchiature con chip da Nvidia.
Dalla Casa Bianca però dubitano che nessuno abbia avvertito Huang. Lui tuttavia rimane fedele alla sua narrazione. Dall’azienda fanno sapere che, “se il governo degli Stati Uniti ritenesse che una persona rappresenti una minaccia per l’industria americana, ce lo farebbe sapere”. Per cui sono sicuri che l’altra Huang, quella sotto accusa, in realtà non fosse una spia. Dall’ambasciata cinese a Washington liquidano la questione come “calunnie e diffamazioni infondate”.
In realtà la Cina avrebbe i suoi motivi per mettere gli occhi su Jensen Huang. La paura di Pechino è che la sua azienda agisca in modo sospetto. A luglio di un anno fa aveva aperto un’indagine per “spiegare i rischi per la sicurezza della vulnerabilità e delle backdoor nei suoi chip H20”, quelli più performanti che Trump aveva bandito. Poi, a settembre, un’altra accusa. Nvidia era stata accusata di aver violato le regole anti-monopolio. Il paradosso è che era stato proprio Huang a spingere Trump ad aprire il mercato tecnologico alla Cina. Secondo lui, limitare le esportazioni sarebbe stato controproducente, perché non ci sarebbe stato controllo sulle attività della rivale. Mentre lo diceva, Pechino lo stava già spiando.
Jensen Huang reported to have had close relationship with tech company executive suspected of passing intel to China
US intelligence agencies believe the Nvidia chief executive, Jensen Huang, has been targeted by an alleged Chinese spy who had done business with him, according to a new report by the New York Times.
Alice Huang or Huang Le, of no relation to the Nvidia CEO, is an executive at a Singapore-based datacenter company called Megaspeed. She had previously been suspected of smuggling Nvidia chips to China, prompting American officials to surveil and monitor her. Those officials have determined that she was acting as a Chinese intelligence asset, passing commercial information to Beijing, the New York Times reported, citing unnamed sources.
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© Photograph: Sean Gallup/Getty Images
© Photograph: Sean Gallup/Getty Images
© Photograph: Sean Gallup/Getty Images
Dimitar DILKOFF / AFP via Getty Images
Microsoft reduced its forecast for capital expenditure, a rare move in an industry that mostly continues to splurge more on huge AI investments.
The software giant said capex for the 2026 calendar year will be $170 billion from a previous forecast of $175 billion.
Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood gave the forecast on the company's fiscal first-quarter earnings call on Wednesday.
She said Microsoft was expecting new capacity to arrive from third-parties, but some of these "GPU-as-a-Service contracts" have been delayed until the second half of the fiscal year.
This likely refers to other providers of AI cloud services that use Nvidia GPUs to run their offerings. Microsoft has partnered with some outside providers to meet rampant AI demand.
Hood's comments could refer to a recent spate of AI data center project delays, which have mostly been caused by a lack of electricity, along with local opposition.
The CFO said Microsoft expects capex to accelerate in the second half of its fiscal year, as the delayed capacity kicks in.
Wall Street has become increasingly concerned the huge investments cloud companies are making to expand AI infrastructure. Microsoft last quarter kept its forecast unchanged, notable as many cloud giants have been steadily increasing their AI spending forecasts.
Overall, Microsoft reported $92.3 billion in revenue, up 19%, for the fiscal first-quarter ending Sept. 30. Azure cloud revenue was up 48% to more than $33 billion, surpassing Wall Street expectations.
Microsoft share were up about about 3% in after-hours trading following the earnings call.
Earlier this week, Microsoft offered a buyout to more than a quarter of its workforce. A Microsoft spokesperson told Business Insider on Wednesday that the company expects 5% of eligible employees at most to accept the buyout.
"We expect very few people to select this offer because of the growth opportunities here at Microsoft," Hood wrote in an internal memo viewed by Business Insider. Microsoft's headcount slipped 2% during the fiscal first quarter, the company reported.
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