The industry is still dealing with the "honeypot" scandal involving NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, but some within the industry believe that this issue is far more significant than just involving one person.

For decades, the Chinese government has been actively engaged in economic espionage. With semiconductors at the center of the AI boom, any company involved in this field faces intense infiltration pressures. At the same time, many executives who have become wealthy due to this boom have also made themselves more vulnerable to becoming targets.

As the CEO of investment intelligence firm Heron Intelligence, Nate Singer has a unique perspective on this issue. His company is engaged in corporate due diligence, which essentially ensures that companies are aware of any negative circumstances before major acquisitions or appointments of senior executives. Singer stated that although the NVIDIA incident is particularly serious, it is just the tip of the iceberg.

Singer to TechCrunch said, 'We already have former employees talking about the behavior of senior management.' He stated that these executives 'have indeed crossed lines that they shouldn't have crossed.'

In a widely circulated LinkedIn post, Singer described in detail a case where the wife of a certain CEO suddenly appeared in the board meeting room, “shouting that her husband and another senior executive of the company were flying around in the company’s business jet with several young women (it was later discovered that these women were also entities supported by the state).”

This is a shocking story, but unfortunately, such cases are not uncommon. Singer says that he has seen at least three reports of similar incidents and suspects that there are many more that have not come to light.

Singer said, 'There's far more than just this one woman. They have already infiltrated these companies.'

Semiconductor companies have always been a major target for the theft of international trade secrets. In recent years, there have been dozens of such cases prosecuted, including one in 2006 involving TSMC, a giant in wafer foundry services.

In 2017, four executives from an unnamed "semiconductor equipment manufacturer in the Bay Area" were accused of stealing trade secrets for use by a competing company in China. According to the indictment, the technology in question "involved the mass production of semiconductor wafers used in lighting and electronic devices such as flat-screen TVs and smartphones."

Sexual factors in such cases are rarely made public, partly because this can have serious consequences for both the executives involved and their companies. However, according to Singer, this persistent threat has become a kind of open secret within the industry.

He said about TechCrunch: "There are many senior professionals in the industry who are aware that such things are happening, and in fact, they are turning a blind eye to it."