The woman he was having an affair with is suspected of being a Chinese spy, and she may have been using him to circumvent US export controls to move lots of NVidia chips into China.

but we don't have any evidence of that? also, seems the wrong person to target to do that right? He'd leave a long evidence trail trying to get people in the company to do that? I'd think if you wanted to do that you'd target someone further down in the operations side of things. So all we have is he had an affair with a possible "spy"? If he didn't know she was a spy, and didn't take any actions that circumvent anything, basically he just had an affair? Given intelligence agencies knew about this for a long time, and didn't tell him, kind of says they didn't have anything of substance and there was no real risk?

We actually don't, other than the U.S. government claiming she is. The timing of this seems quite odd considering the current government just lost an election, and has a history of blaming things on China.

> but we don't have any evidence of that?

Only accusations and suspicions at present, possible evidence in the future.

I don't have a deep understanding of the events, but my superficial impression is that China set up a shell company (Megaspeed) in Singapore, and put this woman in charge of it. She then persuaded Huang to engage in intercourse of the physical and commercial varieties. I get the impression he may have convinced some US officials to look the other way, to not dig into the affairs of the "Singaporean" company. That's where he may have strayed from "sucker" into "co-conspirator."

That would be problematic irrespective of him having an affair with her though. The real story then should be the circumvention of the export ban and the coercion of US officials, not the affair itself.

The "honey pot" element is just part of the story, it's how they penetrated his defenses, and secured his willingness to help. It's not the whole story, but it's an integral part.

A CEO cheating on his wife doesn't exactly paint them as a trustworthy leader to partners, suppliers and customers. Even less so when he does it twice, with a foreign intelligence operative.

I kind of just assume this (affairs) is likely the case with a reasonable percentage of CEOs, and if he didn't know she was a spy, he was just having an affair. Also given all the photos, it wasn't even that much of a secret. I'm just struggling to see what he did wrong other than the affair. Given approx 15-20% in US have affairs not really out of the ordinary.