DOJ asks about Nvidia's Hugging Face deal, Reuters reports; NYT reports US probe of Megaspeed executive

The U.S. Justice Department has made inquiries about how Nvidia's $12.93 billion deal to buy open-source AI platform Hugging Face would affect competition in artificial intelligence, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters in an exclusive report on Oct. 28.

The DOJ questions. According to Reuters' sources, officials have asked whether the deal would let Nvidia capture a fundamental distribution point for AI, and the questions are part of a broader, years-long DOJ examination of Nvidia's acquisitions, investments and sales practices. The DOJ declined to comment, citing policy, and Nvidia declined to comment to Reuters. Nvidia has said it expects the deal to close in the first half of 2027 and that Hugging Face will continue to work with a range of chip, cloud and AI providers. Government investigations are not evidence of wrongdoing and do not necessarily lead to lawsuits.

The Megaspeed report. Separately, the New York Times reported that U.S. intelligence agencies investigated whether Alice Huang (also known as Huang Le), an executive at Singapore-based data center company Megaspeed, was gathering information for Beijing, citing anonymous sources, as TechCrunch reported. Megaspeed had previously been investigated over suspected diversion of Nvidia chips to China, according to the Times. It is not clear what information, if any, she obtained, and no charges have been reported.

Nvidia's response. An Nvidia spokesperson told TechCrunch that its CEO's interactions with Ms. Huang were "not unusual or unexpected" and that "our regional cloud customers receive ordinary business information — not sensitive NVIDIA trade secrets — and zero information relevant to national security." The Chinese embassy called the allegations "groundless smears and slanders," according to the Times.