240,000 banned Nvidia chips reached China via Alice Huang
She even claimed Jensen would often celebrate her birthday with dinner and gifts, people familiar with her told The Information. Alice Huang, the Chinese businesswoman Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has admitted to having an affair with, regularly posted photos of herself with him on WeChat. She also showed other pictures to customers as proof of her direct line to Nvidia’s boss.
US officials have concluded that Huang was recruited by China’s Ministry of State Security, and she allegedly helped move around 240,000 banned Nvidia chips into China, mostly H100 and H200 GPUs. A network of companies tied to her is estimated to have secured about $7.5 billion worth of Nvidia AI hardware during the three years she was in Jensen’s circle. Parker Schmitt, CEO of data software firm NetThunder, recalled a June 2024 night in Taipei when she told a group of executives, “I bet you guys I can get Jensen here. By October 2023, it had Nvidia Preferred Cloud Partner status, which comes with priority access to scarce chips. About $4.6 billion worth of AI chips came in through Megaspeed between 2023 and 2025, and another $2 billion went through its Malaysian subsidiary, Speedmatrix. The NYT reported that Huang met Jensen at an Italian restaurant in Singapore in December 2023. Jensen, 63, admitted the affair on Sunday. Nvidia has said it stopped all sales and shipments to Megaspeed in June 2025.
A source also told The Information that Kang Wei, a fund manager introduced as her husband, met Jensen in the 2010s. The NYT reported that President Donald Trump was briefed on the intelligence about a year ago and took no action.
That access, the report says, paid off. Huang often pointed to her closeness with Nvidia and its suppliers as the reason she could always get AI chips, according to The Information. An Nvidia China sales employee said she was a familiar face at the company’s annual event for local Chinese partners. The Information describes a “labyrinth” of companies built around Shanghai Century Litong, a data centre operator founded in June 2023. “I was unfaithful to my wife,” he wrote in a memo to employees. The board said it has “no reason to believe that either national security or Nvidia secrets were compromised. Megaspeed says it is investigating the diversion claims internally. On Monday, Trump said Jensen told him, “I had no idea that she was a spy,” and said he believes him.
When shipments were delayed or stuck, she would allegedly step in and get them moving. The photos weren’t only on WeChat. The New York Times verified images from her social media showing the two together in Shanghai, at Nvidia’s Silicon Valley headquarters, at a golf resort south of San Jose and in Taiwan. He turned up soon after and had a whiskey with them. The shareholder that set it up was controlled by Huang Yu, Alice Huang’s sister. It went on to sell computing power to Alibaba, Tencent and smaller Chinese AI labs. Megaspeed is the Singapore firm where Huang was a top executive. It was reportedly owned by a company carrying her Chinese name, Huang Le Limited, before being sold to the Singaporean entity Swiftdata. When US export officials inspected Speedmatrix’s data centres, much of the Nvidia hardware was still in boxes. The ties may go back further than people thought. Four days after she restructured Megaspeed’s ownership, it was named an Nvidia cloud partner. “There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry. Nvidia’s board has opened an independent probe led by the law firm Wachtell Lipton and Joon H. Kim, a former acting US attorney. Jensen stays on as CEO during the review. China has rejected the espionage allegations, and Alice Huang has not responded to requests for comment. The Republican leaders of three House committees have asked Jensen to appear at a closed-door briefing this month. Those questions will land on a CEO who spent much of the past year pushing Washington to let Nvidia sell more freely to China. You use AI every day. Now get your AI Quotient. Take the AIQ test.