India, Nov. 10 -- Jensen Huang, the Nvidia chief executive who spent years lobbying Washington to let his company sell artificial intelligence chips in China, admitted on November 8 to an affair with a woman suspected of being a spy - in a scandal that has once again put the spotlight on the rivalry over AI hardware.

The US has fought that contest mainly by controlling access to a handful of companies that supply the world's most advanced chips and the machines that make them. China has spent the same years working around those curbs and trying to build its own.

Very few companies can provide the kind of chips that artificial intelligence can run on.

Nvidia designs the processors most widely used to develop and run AI models, known as ...