Red wine flows among toasts in an elegant restaurant in Shanghai. Across the windows, skyscrapers reflect on the waters of the Huangpu River. It's January 2026, and Jensen Huang, the founder of Nvidia, has traveled to China to celebrate the Lunar New Year with his company's employees. The Taiwanese-born businessman shares a table with several guests. Among them is a Chinese woman who raises her glass to toast with him. Her name is Alice Huang. The scene is immortalized in a photograph she shares on WeChat, the equivalent of WhatsApp in the Asian country. It was not the first time they appeared together, nor would it be the last time those images would raise questions.
Because the woman smiling next to the man who controls the most coveted chips on the planet is now under suspicion of having worked for Beijing's intelligence services. Alice maintained a romantic relationship with Huang while developing a business career closely linked to Nvidia's technology.
Scrutiny over Alice's role in the semiconductor business is growing. According to an investigation published by The Information, the businesswoman allegedly leveraged her relationship with Huang and her contacts at Nvidia to facilitate the supply to Chinese companies of about 240,000 H100, H200, and A100 processors, subject to Washington's export restrictions and valued at least $7.5 billion.
At the center of this plot is Shanghai Century Litong, a company founded in June 2023 that just four months later obtained preferred partner status with Nvidia for cloud services, granting it priority access to its chips. According to the U.S. media, when processor orders began to be blocked due to restrictions, Huang's mistress allegedly intervened to ensure supply.
Alice's story (42 years old) has all the ingredients of an international intrigue soap opera: a former television journalist, a meteoric rise in the financial world, a web of offshore companies, multimillion-dollar deals with U.S. technology, and an intimate relationship with one of the most influential businessmen in the world.
From Beijing to Hong Kong's Financial Circles
The first records bearing her name date back to 2010, when she was linked to a small entertainment company based in an exclusive private golf club in Beijing frequented by officials and businessmen. Then, her professional career began as a reporter at provincial Hunan TV and later at CCTV, the state broadcaster.
She left the microphones to carve a path in the financial circles of Hong Kong and Shanghai. Media from the former British colony have noted that she earned a master's degree in Media Management from Baptist University. She then secured a job as an assistant to the president of private banking at HSBC and rose to a vice presidency at CITIC Securities, one of China's major financial groups. These credentials appear in her professional profiles.
In 2016 and 2017, Shanghai Hexi Investment Management, a Chinese private equity firm, presented her as an executive and member of its investment committee. Reuters found a business card with her name and an address in Lujiazui, Shanghai's financial district. The address leads to an office in a skyscraper that is currently under construction.
It was in that universe of investment funds, business stakes, and international operations where she began to weave a network of businesses that would eventually connect her to the tech industry. Her big leap came in March 2023. Alice took control of 7Road International, a former video game subsidiary based in Singapore, and transformed it into Megaspeed. The company left behind digital entertainment to purchase servers equipped with Nvidia processors and install them in data centers in Southeast Asia.
This operation was structured through a company registered in the British Virgin Islands, which acquired the Singaporean subsidiary of 7Road. Subsequently, Megaspeed came under the control of another shell company in Singapore, a structure that obscured its connections with Chinese investors. Behind the business, according to an investigation by the New York Times, there was a network of tech entrepreneurs from Shanghai with ties to data centers, government agencies, and the Chinese defense industry.
In December 2023, Alice was already meeting personally with Jensen Huang. A previously unknown photograph, verified by the New York Times, shows them together in an Italian restaurant in Singapore, accompanied by several executives. The Nvidia founder appears in his signature black leather jacket with a glass of red wine. Alice smiles beside him. She had just reorganized the ownership of Megaspeed and had reasons to celebrate: just four days after that business transfer, the company obtained Nvidia partner status for cloud services, which opened the doors to its coveted processors. The image shows that her closeness to Huang dated back much further than was publicly known.
While the U.S. limited the direct sale of its most powerful chips to China, these data centers could offer remote access to enormous computing capacity. Megaspeed's growth was spectacular. According to Financial Times, its balance sheet went from about $33 million to around $3 billion in 2024.
Megaspeed's Malaysian subsidiary transferred the use of its servers and certain intellectual property rights to Apex, a subsidiary linked to Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, which would become its main client. That structure allowed providing enormous processing capacity from Southeast Asia to Chinese companies that had restricted access to the most advanced U.S. chips.
The former video game company had become a significant regional buyer of the most coveted technology. Although since November 2023, Alice's name had mysteriously disappeared from Megaspeed's management. However, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal, in August 2025, she was still presenting herself to potential partners as the company's CEO. She boasted that she could easily obtain the coveted Nvidia GPUs and showcased Alibaba as one of her main clients.
Another key figure in this web is Kang Wei, a Chinese fund manager whom the economic press in his country has presented as a kind of prodigy of the markets. Over time, he accumulated investments in tech and gaming companies. According to new information, Kang and Alice were in a romantic relationship, in addition to a business one. Some reports even suggest that Kang is Alice's husband.
Both managed a network of interconnected companies through which they participated in business acquisitions. Kang, who has been under scrutiny by Chinese regulatory authorities for stock market violations in the Asian country, also allegedly benefited from connections with Nvidia's founder. The financier boasted to potential investors about Alice's contacts with Jensen Huang and used them as leverage to attract funding for his tech ventures.
Alongside her business ascent, Alice cultivated an increasingly close relationship with Jensen Huang, who is married with two children. The first photographs together date back to June 2024, during a party held in Taipei. More images followed in California and Shanghai.
Ultimately, the romance came under scrutiny from U.S. intelligence services when Megaspeed's business began to raise suspicions in Washington. By late 2024, the U.S. Department of Commerce sent an official to inspect one of Megaspeed's data centers to verify that the processors acquired from Nvidia were indeed installed there.
The visit left a troubling image for investigators: some of the equipment remained in its original packaging, raising doubts about whether it was to be used at those facilities or transferred elsewhere.
Suspicions also reached the authorities in Taiwan. According to the New York Times, the island's security services began monitoring Alice's travels in 2024 at Washington's request. The businesswoman entered Taiwanese territory with a Hong Kong passport and made trips that went beyond her public meetings with Jensen Huang.
Attention must also be paid to Singapore, where Megaspeed was registered. For part of 2025, authorities prohibited Alice from leaving the country and summoned her for questioning in an investigation into possible false import declarations. Ultimately, investigators found insufficient evidence to implicate her personally and closed the inquiries against her, although the investigation into Megaspeed remains open. Alice ended up returning to Shanghai while other executives took over the day-to-day management of the business.
U.S. investigators have been trying to determine whether some of the sophisticated processors acquired by Megaspeed may have ended up in Chinese territory, circumventing the restrictions imposed by the U.S. to prevent Beijing from accessing the most advanced AI technology. The big question is whether that extramarital relationship also served to open a backdoor to Nvidia's technological heart.