Alice Huang, the alleged Chinese spy, may have also owned a stake in a Chinese business that benefited Huawei, Nvidia’s biggest competitor in China. Nvidia It was also reported that she had a romantic relationship with ousted CEO Jensen Huang.
Alice Huang’s relationship with 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.
The previously unreported link was first uncovered by an investigative firm that uses artificial intelligence to gather evidence and specializes in national security investigations around the world. This connection could raise questions about Alice Huang’s intentions and actions in her relationship with the CEO, and whether Jensen Huang knew that his girlfriend had close ties to a competitor. Jensen Huang has admitted to having an affair, but the exact date of his relationship with Alice Huang is unknown.
Alice Huang’s enigmatic story is a tangle of companies and deals that ultimately point to her ties to the entity that provided computing power to China’s Huawei.
Huawei is known as the Chinese government’s “national champion” in technology and telecommunications, meaning it receives huge financial support from Beijing to lower prices and beat global competitors. It is considered a key part of the Chinese government’s push for global technological superiority and is closely linked to the Chinese Communist Party.
Documents reviewed by CNBC show that companies associated with Alice Fan were involved in supplying NVIDIA computing power to Huawei around the same time that she and Jensen Fan were first seen together in public in December 2023.
Nvidia said Huawei will be its top competitor in 2024, especially in the field of artificial intelligence chips, including graphics processing units, central processing units and networking chips.
“This activity uncovered through analysis of the Alice network warrants a national security and (technology) counterproliferation investigation,” said Brian Andersen, Tessari’s vice president of national security applications and a former supervisory special agent with the Homeland Security Investigations Agency.
If investigations by the Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security and the Department of Homeland Security find evidence that someone transferred “controlled equipment” to Huawei without authorization, potential charges could include export control violations, collusion and smuggling, Andersen said.
The relationship between Alice Huang and Huawei is so complex that Tessari analysts told CNBC that they suspect, based on their previous investigative experience, that the relationship was intentionally designed to 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 his cell phone. Alice Huang could not be reached.
Alice Huang, whose Chinese name was Huang Le and who according to documents from the time was based in Hong Kong, sold a cloud business she owned called Osmansus to Chinese gaming company 7Road in 2019, according to Chinese company records and media reports compiled by Tesari and provided to CNBC. The Singapore-based 7Road subsidiary was spun off as ‘Megaspeed’ in 2023. MegaSpeed will now be a major customer for Nvidia, helping to facilitate at least $7.5 billion in shipments of Nvidia chips to Chinese companies, The Information reported on Tuesday.
Already in 2016, Alice Fan also became part owner of a financial company called Shanghai Hexi, which has invested heavily in high technology and data centers. In 2021, Hexi acquired a 27 percent stake in a company called Shanghai Century Longteng, a data center development company, and Hexi held this company until 2024. That company owned a 50.1 percent controlling interest in a data center facility called Shenzhen Yifeng Technology Co., Ltd. Ltd. in Mainland China.
A June 7, 2024 photo showing NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang and a woman identified by Reuters sources as Alice Huang in Taipei, Taiwan.
Reuters
The data center’s primary customer was Huawei Cloud, a subsidiary of Huawei Technologies based in Shenzhen, China.
Additionally, Alice Huang’s company Hexi guaranteed the loan needed to finance a data center in Shenzhen that was doing business with Huawei.
Hexi did not immediately respond to messages sent via its LinkedIn page outside of normal business hours.
CNBC translated company records and Chinese news articles provided by Tesari into Mandarin.
In this photo illustration, the Huawei logo is displayed on a smartphone with the Chinese flag in the background.
Sopa Images | Light Rocket | Getty Images
It’s not clear whether Shenzhen data centers were able to acquire Nvidia GPUs, but the majority of their owners started buying chips in 2023. The company is known as Zhejiang Century Huatong Group and is a business partner with Alice Huang’s Hexi through joint ownership of Century Longteng.
This made Alice Fan a co-owner of the data center that provides computing power to Huawei. And it happened around the same time that Alice and Jensen Huang were first spotted together in public.
And this raises the question of why Huawei, which has access to Chinese chips, would need to borrow computing power from outside companies.
Although Hexi divested its stake in the data center development company in 2024, 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 served as a director. In 2022, Kang became an executive at Century Longteng, which owns the controlling stake in Shenzhen’s data center, and was present at the signing of the company’s contract with Huawei.
