英伟达间谍丑闻核心人物黄爱丽丝是谁？Who Is Alice Huang, the Woman in the Middle of Nvidia’s Spy Scandal?

The Woman in the Middle of Nvidia’s Spy Scandal Alice Huang, who U.S. intelligence determined is a Chinese asset, emerged from the high-flying world of Shanghai finance to work with tech titans and obtain essential A.I. chips.

In December 2023, a Chinese executive who goes by Alice Huang met with Nvidia’s chief executive, 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, Ms. Huang smiled as she posed next to Mr. Huang, who was in his trademark black leather jacket.

He held a glass of red wine. For Ms. 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 U.S. government had barred Chinese companies from buying the advanced chips, but Ms. 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 a Nvidia cloud partner, giving it access to the coveted components. Their relationship is now at the center of a global geopolitical competition between China and the U.S. government to dominate A.I.

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 A.I. kingmakers like Mr. Huang. The meeting in Singapore was a sign of how Ms. Huang’s relationship with Mr. 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 Mr. Huang’s dealings with Megaspeed and Ms. Huang last year. Last month, The Times reported that U.S. officials had concluded she was a Chinese intelligence asset who had developed a close relationship with the Nvidia leader, and that President Trump had taken no action when briefed on the situation last year. Last week, The Times reported that Ms. Huang had been recruited to spy by China’s Ministry of State Security.

On Sunday, Mr. 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 Mr. Huang and Ms. Huang, including when they met and when she may have been recruited by Chinese intelligence, are not known.

But Ms. Huang’s work with Megaspeed put her in the middle of a sprawling effort to accumulate A.I. chips across Southeast Asia and provide access to the technology to China’s companies.

Photos from Ms. Huang’s social media, which were verified by The Times, show that she and Mr. Huang met across the globe over the past three years, including in Shanghai; at Nvidia’s Silicon Valley headquarters; at a golf resort south of San Jose, Calif., and in Taiwan. After the 2023 meeting in Singapore, Ms. 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 United States had dispatched a Commerce Department official to check on Ms. Huang’s company. She was monitored by Taiwan’s government during her visits to the island, including when she appeared publicly with Mr. 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 centers, the government and the defense industry.

Between 2024 and 2026, the firm bought billions of dollars of Nvidia’s advanced A.I. technology, bringing Ms. Huang further into Mr. Huang’s orbit.

Details about Ms. 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. Ms. Huang did not respond to a request for comment. Nvidia and Megaspeed declined to comment.

China has denied the espionage claims. A Life in Finance For many years, Ms. 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, Ms. Huang is closely linked to a business partner named Kang Wei. Mr. Kang, a 51-year-old fund manager, has been introduced as Ms. 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. Mr. 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 Mr. 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. Mr. Kang has bragged about Ms. Huang’s connections to Nvidia’s Mr. Huang and used those ties to raise money for their businesses, according to one of the people.

Mr. Kang did not respond to a request for comment. Ms. Huang’s career mirrored Mr. Kang’s focus on finance.

According to her online résumé, she spent four years as a television reporter before working at HSBC’s private bank and CITIC Securities, a Chinese state-backed investment bank. Got a confidential news tip?

The New York Times would like to hear from readers who want to share messages and materials with our journalists. Occasionally, she appeared with Mr. 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 Ms. 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, Ms. 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, Ms. Huang and Mr. 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 A.I. computing center in Shanghai for the internet giant Tencent.

That set the stage for Ms. Huang’s next effort: a push abroad to acquire critical chips. Building Megaspeed In late 2022, the U.S. government began instituting restrictions on the sale of advanced A.I. 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, Ms. 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, Ms. Huang remained in control of Megaspeed’s day-to-day operations, according to people familiar with the company. By June 2024, Ms. Huang was close enough to Mr. Huang that she bragged about her access to Mr. Huang at a tech event in Taipei.

Just after midnight, she was mingling with a crowd of tech executives when she offered to ask Mr. Huang 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 Mr. Schmitt, who is chief executive of NetThunder, a data software provider. Shortly after, Mr. Huang arrived and drank a whiskey shot with the group.

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

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

Business Takes Off That same month, Ms. Huang’s fledgling business had a series of breakthroughs. Megaspeed began receiving large shipments of Nvidia’s most advanced A.I. chips, eventually securing more than $4 billion of the precious hardware.

The company also landed a major new customer: the 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, Ms. Huang’s large A.I. chip orders began to attract attention. In late 2024, the U.S. Commerce Department sent an official to inspect a Megaspeed data center 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 Ms. Huang’s trips to the island at the suggestion of the U.S. government, a person familiar with the matter said. She entered Taiwan on a Hong Kong passport and made trips beyond her public appearances with Mr. Huang.

In March 2025, Ms. Huang traveled to the United States and visited Mr. 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 Ms. 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 Ms. Huang was complicit in the false declarations and investigations against her were concluded, the person said. Singaporean authorities have said they are still investigating Megaspeed.

Ms. Huang 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 center in Malaysia, for which A.I. chips have been secured. In Ms. 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 Ms. 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 A.I. server factory, where, it said, more than 100 technicians can repair servers down to the chip level and reconfigure them.

Pei-Lin Wu and Chris Buckley contributed research from Taiwan. Aric Toler and Sanjana Varghese contributed reporting.

Paul Mozur is the global technology correspondent for The Times, based in Taipei. Previously he wrote about technology and politics in Asia from Hong Kong, Shanghai and Seoul.

Ana Swanson covers trade and international economics for The Times and is based in Washington. She has been a journalist for more than a decade.

Tripp Mickle reports for The Times on some of the world’s biggest tech companies, including Nvidia, Google and Apple. He also writes about tech industry trends like layoffs and artificial intelligence.

Michael Forsythe a reporter on the investigations team at The Times, based in New York. He has written extensively about, and from, China.