Alleged Chinese spy Alice Huang may have simultaneously owned stakes in businesses in China that benefited Nvidia's biggest competitor in China, Huawei, while she was in business with Nvidia and also reportedly having a romantic affair with its ousted CEO Jensen Huang.
The connection between Alice Huang and Huawei was first discovered by analysts at private intelligence firm Tesari. The firm exclusively shared its findings with CNBC. Tesari provides intelligence research to private companies and the U.S. government.
This previously unreported entanglement was first uncovered by the research firm which uses artificial intelligence to collect evidence and specializes in national security investigations around the world. The connections may raise questions about Alice Huang's intent and conduct in her relationship with the CEO and whether Jensen Huang knew his romantic partner was closely connected with his competition. Jensen Huang has acknowledged having an affair, though the precise timing of his relationship with Alice Huang is unknown.
The mysterious saga of Alice Huang involves a tangle of interlocking corporations and transactions that show her connection to entities that ultimately provided computing power to Huawei in China.
Huawei is known as a Chinese government "state champion" in the technology and telecommunications sectors, meaning it receives enormous financial support from the government in Beijing so it can lower prices and undercut global competitors. It is considered a key part of the Chinese government's push for global technical dominance and is closely linked to the Chinese Communist Party.
Businesses connected to Alice Huang were linked with supplying Nvidia computing power to Huawei, according to documents reviewed by CNBC, around the same time she and Jensen Huang were first publicly seen together in December 2023.
In 2024, Nvidia said Huawei was a top competitor, specifically in artificial intelligence chips including graphics processing units, central processing units and networking chips.
"This activity, which surfaced through our analysis of Alice's network, warrants a national security and [technology] counterproliferation investigation," said Brian Andersen, Tesari's vice president for national security applications and a former supervisory special agent with Homeland Security Investigations.
If the Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry Security and Homeland Security Investigations found evidence that anyone transferred "controlled equipment" to Huawei without authorization, potential charges might include include export-control violations, conspiracy and smuggling, Andersen said.
The connection between Alice Huang and Huawei is so convoluted that analysts at Tesari told CNBC that based on their previous investigative experience, they suspect it was designed to deliberately obscure the relationship.
Nvidia and Huawei did not respond to CNBC's requests for comment. Jensen Huang did not respond to a voicemail left on a mobile phone. Alice Huang could not be reached.
According to Chinese corporate records and media reports compiled by Tesari and provided to CNBC, Alice Huang, whose Chinese name is Huang Le and who according to documents at the time was based in Hong Kong, in 2019 sold a cloud business she owned called Osmanthus to a Chinese gaming company called 7Road. A subsidiary of 7Road, which was based in Singapore, was spun off as "Megaspeed" in 2023. Megaspeed would go on to become a key Nvidia customer, helping facilitate at least $7.5 billion in Nvidia chip shipments to Chinese firms, The Information reported Tuesday.
As early as 2016, Alice Huang had also become a co-owner of a financial firm known as Shanghai Hexi, which heavily invests in tech and data centers. In 2021, Hexi in turn acquired 27 percent of a company called Shanghai Century Longteng, a data center developer, which Hexi held until 2024. That firm owned a controlling 50.1 percent stake in a data center facility called Shenzhen Yifeng Technology Co., Ltd. in mainland China.
The key customer of that data center was Huawei Cloud, the Shenzhen, China-based subsidiary of Huawei Technologies.
In addition, Alice Huang's firm Hexi guaranteed the loans required to finance the Shenzhen data center, which did business with Huawei.
Hexi did not immediately respond to a message via its LinkedIn page sent outside of normal business hours.
CNBC translated corporate records and Chinese news articles in Mandarin that Tesari provided.
It's not clear if the Shenzhen data center was able to acquire Nvidia GPUs, but its majority owner began purchasing the chips in 2023. That company is known as Zhejiang Century Huatong Group and is a business partner of Alice Huang's Hexi through their joint ownership of Century Longteng.
That made Alice Huang a part owner of a data center providing computing power to Huawei. And that was happening at around the same time the first known sightings came of Alice Huang and Jensen Huang in public together.
And that raises the question of why Huawei, which has access to Chinese made chips, would need to rent computing power from an outside entity.
Hexi exited its stake in the data center development company in 2024, but individuals within Alice Huang's network are still connected to the Shenzhen data center. Her husband Kang Wei is a longtime business associate who founded Hexi, where Alice Huang previously held an executive role. In 2022, Kang became an executive of Century Longteng, which owns the controlling stake in the Shenzhen data center and he also attended the company's signing of the Huawei agreement.
