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Alleged Chinese spy at heart of Nvidia scandal is in Beijing
The suspected Chinese spy at the center of a scandal that threatens to take down Nvidia Corp.
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The suspected Chinese spy at the center of a scandal that threatens to take down Nvidia Corp. Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang has returned to her home country, people familiar with the matter said.
Megaspeed International founder Alice Huang is currently living in Beijing with the knowledge of security officials, one of the people said, asking to remain anonymous to discuss a sensitive situation. It wasn’t immediately clear when or why she traveled to the capital, nor what she may be engaged in, the people said.
Alice Huang’s whereabouts have been the topic of intense speculation since Nvidia’s founder admitted to an extra-marital affair and the company’s board began an investigation into allegations she’s a Chinese spy. Known also as Huang Le, the former journalist who became a power broker renting advanced chips to the nation’s top firms was the catalyst for a controversy that roiled markets and may now result in Jensen Huang’s ouster. Beijing has denied that the woman was a spy. China’s Foreign Ministry didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Deep Dive
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Alice Huang first came into the CEO’s orbit after founding Megaspeed, the largest buyer of Nvidia’s chips in Southeast Asia — a major route for smuggling the firm’s advanced hardware into China. She oversaw the incredible ascent of a fledgling neocloud, which rose to become one of Nvidia’s most important partners in the regional data center boom. Attempts to reach her were unsuccessful on Thursday.
Online posts and publicly available information have provided the broad contours of Megaspeed’s rise, and the critical role she played in that.
She founded Megaspeed in 2023 following a career in private equity and television. The company was spun off from one of China’s largest video game enterprises, 7Road Holdings Ltd., just months after former US President Joe Biden imposed sweeping restrictions on shipments of advanced AI chips to China. 7Road first sold its Singapore subsidiary to a British Virgin Islands entity called Huang Le Ltd., and Huang Le assumed control.
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In November 2023, Huang Le Ltd. sold Megaspeed to a Singapore shell company. Days after the sale, the firm was designated an official Nvidia Cloud Partner — a highly coveted status that granted it preferred chip access from a company that plays kingmaker to the industry.
Trade records show that Megaspeed has since imported goods worth more than a thousand times its cash balance in 2023. Its imports of Nvidia products have topped $4.6 billion. At multiple facilities in Southeast Asia, the company rents Nvidia chips to Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., itself a recent subject of US national security concerns. The AI and e-commerce company, which has denied Washington’s allegations of ties to China’s military, has declined to comment on the relationship.
The Singaporean authorities, which had been looking into whether Megaspeed violated local laws, briefly detained its founder in 2025, inviting her in for questioning and restricting her from leaving the country.
Shortly after that occurred, in the late summer of 2025, Nvidia general counsel Tim Teter called Commerce Under Secretary Jeffrey Kessler, who oversees US chip export curbs, to ask about the Megaspeed investigation, Bloomberg News reported. It’s unclear whether Teter made any specific requests of Kessler related to his own agency’s investigation into Megaspeed, which was separate from Singapore’s.
Megaspeed said the island nation’s probe hasn’t produced any adverse findings for the firm. Singapore returned her passport at some point, allowing Alice Huang to leave the country, a person familiar with the matter said, asking to remain anonymous to discuss private information. She flew to Shanghai after the investigation ended, the New York Times reported, citing a person familiar with the company. Singapore’s Ministry of Home Affairs did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Alice Huang got her start in finance before getting into the neocloud business.
She served as vice general manager of Shanghai Hexi Investment Co. since November 2015, the fund house said in a few posts on its official WeChat account in late 2016 and early 2017. Previously, she held roles at Citic Securities Co. and HSBC Holdings Plc, according to Hexi posts.
HSBC and Citic Securities representatives didn’t respond to Bloomberg requests for comment, while Hexi wasn’t immediately available when reached by phone.
