Alleged Chinese spy Alice Huang may have owned stakes in businesses in China that benefited Huawei, Nvidia's biggest competitor in the country, while she was doing business with Nvidia and reportedly having an affair with its ousted CEO Jensen Huang, CNBC reported.
The connection was first discovered by analysts at Tesari, a private intelligence firm that uses artificial intelligence to collect evidence and specialises in national security investigations. The firm provides research to private companies and the US government.
The previously unreported link may raise questions about Alice Huang's intent and conduct in her relationship with the CEO, and whether Jensen Huang knew his partner was closely connected with a competitor. Jensen Huang has acknowledged the affair, though the exact timing of the relationship is unknown.
According to Hong Kong and Chinese corporate filings and reports by Time Weekly and the 21st Century Business Herald, Alice Huang, whose Chinese name is Huang Le, sold a cloud business she owned, Osmanthus, to Chinese gaming company 7Road in 2019.
A Singapore-based subsidiary of 7Road was spun off as Megaspeed in 2023. Megaspeed became a key Nvidia customer and helped facilitate at least $7.5 billion in Nvidia chip shipments to Chinese firms, The Information reported.
Alice Huang had also become a co-owner of Shanghai Hexi, a financial firm that invests heavily in technology and data centres, as early as 2016.
In 2021, Hexi acquired 27 percent of Shanghai Century Longteng, a data centre developer, and held the stake until 2024. Century Longteng owned a controlling 50.1 percent stake in Shenzhen Yifeng Technology, a data centre in mainland China.
The key customer of that facility was Huawei Cloud, the Shenzhen-based subsidiary of Huawei Technologies. Hexi also guaranteed the loans required to finance the data centre.
It is not clear whether the Shenzhen facility was able to acquire Nvidia GPUs, but its majority owner, Zhejiang Century Huatong Group, began buying the chips in 2023.
The company is a business partner of Hexi through their joint ownership of Century Longteng.
This made Alice Huang a part owner of a data centre providing computing power to Huawei, around the same time she and Jensen Huang were first seen together in public in December 2023.
Huawei is known as a Chinese government "state champion" in the technology and telecommunications sectors. It receives huge financial support from Beijing so it can lower prices and undercut global competitors, and is closely linked to the Chinese Communist Party.
In 2024, Nvidia named Huawei as a top competitor in artificial intelligence chips, including GPUs, CPUs and networking chips.
Hexi exited its stake in Century Longteng in 2024, but people in Alice Huang's network are still connected to the data centre. Her husband Kang Wei, a longtime business associate, founded Hexi, where she previously held an executive role. Kang became an executive of Century Longteng in 2022 and attended the company's signing of the Huawei agreement.
Alice Huang also has ties to Hong Kong dating back about two decades. She first came to the city to study and graduated in 2007 from Baptist University's master of social sciences programme in media management.
Company records show she continues to have links to the city, including as director of a firm that shares an address with a Russian-linked robotics company sanctioned by the US.
