The woman in the middle of Nvidia’s spy scandal

In December 2023, a Chinese executive who goes by Alice Huang met with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and a small group of
colleagues at an Italian restaurant in Singapore.

In a photo of the previously unreported meeting, which was confirmed by The New York Times, Alice Huang smiled as she posed next to Jensen Huang, who was in his trademark black leather jacket. He held a glass of red wine.

For Alice Huang, there was reason to celebrate. Backed by wealthy investors in Shanghai, she had just restructured a company that would soon buy billions of dollars in Nvidia artificial intelligence chips. The US government had barred Chinese companies from buying the advanced chips, but Huang had sidestepped this prohibition by creating a firm, Megaspeed, through a Singaporean shell company.

Her close relationship with Nvidia’s leader also appeared to smooth the way. Four days after the ownership change, Megaspeed was named an Nvidia cloud partner, giving it access to the coveted components.

Their relationship is now at the centre of a global geopolitical competition between China and the US government to dominate AI. It has also shaken and captivated the tech industry on both sides of the Pacific, surfacing often invisible details of the fierce technological race, like spy craft and the human vulnerabilities of AI kingmakers like Jensen Huang.

The meeting in Singapore was a sign of how Alice Huang’s relationship with Jensen Huang goes back further than previously known. It also speaks to the close social and business ties that grew during years of tech collaboration between China and the United States, and how they have persisted despite the icy geopolitical divide of the past decade.

The Times was the first to report Jensen Huang’s dealings with Megaspeed and Alice Huang last year. Last month, the Times reported that US officials had concluded she was a Chinese intelligence asset who had developed a close relationship with the Nvidia leader, and that President Donald Trump had taken no action when briefed on the situation last year. Last week, the Times reported that Alice Huang had been recruited to spy by China’s Ministry of State Security. On Sunday (Monday NZT), Jensen Huang, 63, acknowledged that he had an affair with her, and Nvidia said it was conducting an internal investigation.

Many details of the relationship between Jensen Huang and Alice Huang, including when they met and when she may have been recruited by Chinese intelligence, are not known (the two are not related). But Alice Huang’s work with Megaspeed put her in the middle of a sprawling effort to accumulate AI chips across Southeast Asia and provide access to the technology to China’s companies.

Photos from her social media, which were verified by the Times, show that she and Jensen Huang met around the world over the past three years, including in Shanghai; at Nvidia’s Silicon Valley headquarters in California; at a golf resort south of San Jose, California, and in Taiwan.

After the 2023 meeting in Singapore, Alice Huang, whose Chinese name is Huang Le, used her experience and connections in the world of Shanghai finance to work her way into tech circles. She turned Megaspeed into a destination for Nvidia technology, working with a longtime business partner who was often introduced as her husband.

The success attracted the attention of authorities. By 2024, the US had dispatched a Commerce Department official to check on her company. She was monitored by Taiwan’s government during her visits to the island, including when she appeared publicly with Jensen Huang. For part of 2025, she was not allowed to leave Singapore because of an investigation.

Behind Megaspeed was a network of wealthy tech investors in China with links to domestic data centres, the government and the defence industry. Between 2024 and 2026, the firm bought billions of dollars of Nvidia’s advanced AI technology, bringing Alice Huang further into Jensen Huang’s orbit.

Details about Alice Huang, much of which have not been previously reported, are based on a Times analysis of 15 years of corporate documents, as well as interviews with more than half a dozen people and government officials familiar with her and her business.

Alice Huang did not respond to a request for comment. Nvidia and Megaspeed declined to comment. China has denied the espionage claims.

For many years, Alice Huang’s life was rooted in the high-flying world of Shanghai finance. She mingled easily with tech executives from China and the United States alike, according to people who have met her.

In China, Huang is closely linked to a business partner named Kang Wei. Kang, a 51-year-old fund manager, has been introduced as Huang’s husband to Chinese investors and Megaspeed employees, according to people familiar with the matter. The Times could not verify whether the two are married.

Kang rose to prominence at a young age, earning a reputation as a savvy stock market strategist in the 2000s. Chinese financial media treated him as a sort of boy wonder. By the 2010s, he had moved into private equity, including investing in online gaming firms.

China’s securities regulator has fined Kang at least twice for failing to disclose his stakes in listed companies. He has also struggled with fellow investors for corporate control, according to regulatory filings. Kang has bragged about Huang’s connections to Nvidia’s Huang and used those ties to raise money for their businesses, according to one of the people.

Kang did not respond to a request for comment.

Alice Huang’s career mirrored Kang’s focus on finance. According to her online resume, she spent four years as a television reporter before working at HSBC’s private bank and CITIC Securities, a Chinese state-backed investment bank.

Occasionally, she appeared with Kang. In an August 2023 photo, the two visited a state-backed auto tech company in the eastern city of Nanjing.

The earliest corporate records bearing Huang’s name trace back to a small “sports and leisure club” company registered in 2010 inside Beihu No. 9, a private golf club in Beijing that drew officials and featured themed saunas, steam rooms and a buffet of foie gras, hairy crabs and Häagen-Dazs.

Over the next few years, Huang branched out, investing in a Chinese medical equipment maker that would list its shares in Hong Kong. She acquired her stake through an offshore company, corporate records show.

By 2020, Huang and Kang were known in some of Shanghai’s investment circles. They operated an interconnected web of companies to carry out corporate takeovers and invest in companies. That spring, their network landed a major project, helping build and operate an AI computing centre in Shanghai for the internet giant Tencent.

That set the stage for Huang’s next effort: a push abroad to acquire critical chips.

In late 2022, the US government began instituting restrictions on the sale of advanced AI chips to China. The United States feared that the components could potentially give Beijing an economic and military edge.

To have any hope of getting the chips, a company had to be domiciled outside China and have no obvious ownership ties leading to the country.

In 2023, Huang used a British Virgin Islands company to buy a Singaporean subsidiary of an online gaming company that was linked to her Shanghai network, called 7Road. It was renamed Megaspeed. It would become her first major venture into chips.

Later that year, Megaspeed was transferred to a Singaporean shell company, Singapore records show. After the transfer, Huang remained in control of Megaspeed’s day-to-day operations, according to people familiar with the company.

By June 2024, Huang was close enough to Jensen Huang that she bragged about her access to him at a tech event in Taipei, Taiwan. Just after midnight, she was mingling with a crowd of tech executives when she offered to ask him to join them, recalled Parker Schmitt, who attended.

“She said, ‘I bet you guys I can get Jensen here,’ and then Jensen immediately showed up,” said Schmitt, the CEO of NetThunder, a data software provider. Shortly after, Jensen Huang arrived and drank a whiskey shot with the group.

Jensen Huang was with two other Nvidia executives and had planned to attend the party, said a person close to the company.

Schmitt, who stayed in touch with Alice Huang, said her social media was littered with photos of her and Jensen Huang, including pictures of them at a golf course and at restaurants drinking wine. She wanted to be seen as a talented sales executive, Schmitt said, and “photos with Jensen are a point of pride” in the tech industry.

That same month, Alice Huang’s fledgling business had a series of breakthroughs. Megaspeed began receiving large shipments of Nvidia’s most advanced AI chips, eventually securing more than US$4 billion of the precious hardware.

The company also landed a major new customer: Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba. Months after its sale to the Singaporean shell company, Megaspeed had created a Malaysian subsidiary, which then pledged its servers and intellectual property to a subsidiary of Alibaba called Apex. Alibaba became Megaspeed’s dominant customer, according to a person familiar with the business.

Before long, Huang’s large AI chip orders began to attract attention. In late 2024, the US Commerce Department sent an official to inspect a Megaspeed data centre and confirm that the Nvidia chips delivered were on site. Some Nvidia equipment was still packed in boxes, raising concerns that it was being shipped in or out and was not installed at the location.

That year, Taiwanese authorities began to monitor Huang’s trips to the island at the suggestion of the US government, a person familiar with the matter said. She entered Taiwan on a Hong Kong passport and made trips beyond her public appearances with Jensen Huang.

In March 2025, Alice Huang travelled to the United States and visited Jensen Huang at Nvidia’s offices with other executives, according to a Times analysis of photos from the meeting. Two months later, she was pictured dining with him and others in Taipei, where she posed for a photo and kissed him on the cheek.

Yet trouble was brewing in Singapore, where officials had also been looking into Megaspeed. The Singaporean government prohibited Alice Huang from leaving the country and brought her in for questioning in 2025 as part of an investigation into false declaration of imports, according to a person familiar with the investigation.

There was insufficient evidence to suggest that she was complicit in the false declarations and investigations against her were concluded, the person said. Singaporean authorities have said they are still investigating Megaspeed.

She subsequently flew to Shanghai and a new boss began giving orders to Megaspeed employees, said a person familiar with the company.

Megaspeed has pressed on. It is nearing completion of the first phase of a data centre in Malaysia, for which AI chips have been secured. In Huang’s absence, another executive tied to her network has visited the Malaysia office to help obtain permits and ensure work continues, a person familiar with the operation said.

Other help has come from China. Shanghai Shuoyao, another company in Alice Huang’s network, has sent large groups of Chinese engineers to work on the project, the person said.

In Shanghai, local officials have held up Shuoyao as a model. A July report from the Songjiang district government showcased the company’s new AI server factory, where, it said, more than 100 technicians can repair servers down to the chip level and reconfigure them.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Paul Mozur, Ana Swanson, Tripp Mickle and Michael Forsythe

Photographs by: AFP, Pete Marovich and Ulet Ifansasti

© 2026 THE NEW YORK TIMES