Alice Huang connected to Nvidia’s Chinese competitor Huawei

Alleged Chinese spy Alice Huang may have simultaneously held stakes in companies in China that benefited Nvidia’s largest competitor in China, Huawei, while she was doing business with Nvidia and also allegedly had a romantic affair with its ousted CEO, Jensen Huang.

The connection between Alice Huang and Huawei was first discovered by analysts at the private intelligence firm Tesari. The company shared its findings exclusively with CNBC. Tesari provides intelligence research to private companies and the U.S. government.

This previously unseen tangle was first discovered by the research firm that uses artificial intelligence to collect evidence and specializes in national security investigations around the world. These connections could raise questions about Alice Huang’s intentions and conduct in her relationship with the CEO and whether Jensen Huang knew that his romantic partner was closely tied to his competitors. Jensen Huang has admitted to having an affair, although the precise timing of his relationship with Alice Huang is unknown.

The mysterious saga of Alice Huang involves a tangle of interlocking companies and transactions that show her ties to entities that ultimately supplied computing power to Huawei in China.

Huawei is known as a Chinese government “state champion” in the technology and telecommunications sectors, meaning it receives huge financial support from the Beijing government so it can lower prices and compete with global rivals. It is seen as a key part of the Chinese government’s push for global technical dominance and is closely linked to the Chinese Communist Party.

Companies linked to Alice Huang were linked to supplying Nvidia computing power to Huawei, according to documents reviewed by CNBC, around the same time she and Jensen Huang were first seen publicly together in December 2023.

In 2024, Nvidia said Huawei was one of its main competitors, especially in the field of 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 vice president for national security applications and former supervisory special agent at Homeland Security Investigations.

If the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry Security and Homeland Security Investigations found evidence that someone transferred “controlled equipment” to Huawei without authorization, potential charges could include export control violations, conspiracy and smuggling, Andersen said.

The connection between Alice Huang and Huawei is so complicated that Tesari analysts 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 cell phone. Alice Huang could not be contacted.

According to Chinese company 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 computing company she owned, called Osmanthus, to a Chinese gaming company called 7Road. A subsidiary of Singapore-based 7Road was spun off under the name “Megaspeed” in 2023. Megaspeed would become a key Nvidia customer, helping to facilitate the shipment of at least $7.5 billion worth of Nvidia chips to Chinese companies, The Information reported Tuesday.

By 2016, Alice Huang had also become a co-owner of a financial company known as Shanghai Hexi, which invests heavily in technology and data centers. In 2021, Hexi in turn acquired 27% of a company called Shanghai Century Longteng, a data center developer, which Hexi held until 2024. This company owned a 50.1% majority stake in a data center called Shenzhen Yifeng Technology Co., Ltd.

The key customer for this data center was Huawei Cloud, the subsidiary of Huawei Technologies based in Shenzhen, China.

Furthermore, Alice Huang’s company Hexi guaranteed the loans necessary 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 company filings and Chinese news articles provided by Tesari into Mandarin.

It is unclear whether the Shenzhen data center was able to acquire Nvidia GPUs, but its majority owner began purchasing the chips in 2023. This company is known as Zhejiang Century Huatong Group and is a business partner of Alice Huang’s Hexi through its co-ownership of Century Longteng.

This made Alice Huang a co-owner of a data center providing computing power to Huawei. And this was happening around the same time that the first known sightings of Alice Huang and Jensen Huang in public took place together.

And that raises the question of why Huawei, which has access to Chinese-made chips, should lease computing power from an outside entity.

Hexi abandoned its stake in the data center development company in 2024, but individuals in 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 a management position. In 2022, Kang became an executive of Century Longteng, which owns the majority stake in the Shenzhen data center, and he also attended the company’s signing of the Huawei deal.