At least $7.5 billion in Nvidia chip shipments to Chinese companies since 2023 were made possible in part by Alice Huang’s relationship with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and his company, according to a new report from The Information that cites sources familiar with the matter. Alice Huang is suspected of being a Chinese intelligence asset.
The Information published the figure on Tuesday, a few days after Jensen Huang admitted to an affair. The New York Times was the first outlet to name the woman as Alice Huang. Each detail that has surfaced since then has made the situation worse for Nvidia, which dominates the market for AI chips.
The market reacted
Nvidia stock lost more than 4% on Monday and fell a further 5% on Tuesday.
The company’s board of directors has opened an independent investigation. Nvidia said it has no reason to believe that national security or company secrets were compromised.
Roughly 240,000 restricted chips
The Information’s sources said Alice Huang helped get about 240,000 restricted Nvidia chips into China. Most of them were H100 and H200 processors, which are Nvidia’s high-end parts, and the rest included older A100 chips. Some of that hardware reportedly ended up in data centers that serve Alibaba and Tencent, two of China’s largest tech companies.
According to the report, when orders hit supply problems, she allegedly used her contacts inside Nvidia and among its distributors to help secure the restricted chips.
The report says Alice Huang, her husband and her sister were tied to a network of companies in China and Singapore that acquired the chips.
A cloud company with fast access
The first of those companies is Shanghai Century Litong, a Chinese cloud computing firm founded in June 2023. The Information reported that Huang Yu, Alice Huang’s sister, indirectly controlled the company that became Century Litong’s founding shareholder. That shareholder left Century Litong in 2024.
Within four months of being founded, Century Litong had become a preferred cloud partner of Nvidia, a status that gave it priority access to the company’s chips. The designation came shortly after the U.S. widened its export restrictions to cover the A800 and H800, two chips Nvidia had designed for the Chinese market.
That timing is significant. According to The Information, Century Litong managed to obtain large volumes of A800 and H800 chips already held by distributors, even though the new rules limited shipments into China.
The Singapore side of the network
The second company is Megaspeed, which is based in Singapore. Alice Huang was its managing director from March to November 2023. Corporate records show that Megaspeed was previously owned by a British Virgin Islands entity carrying her Chinese name, Huang Le Limited.
In November 2023, control of Megaspeed passed to another Singapore-based company.
The Information reports that chips acquired by Megaspeed were later either installed in Southeast Asian data centers and rented out remotely to Chinese customers, or physically shipped into China. Megaspeed created a Malaysian subsidiary, Speedmatrix, in February 2024. People familiar with Speedmatrix’s business said some of the Nvidia hardware it bought eventually reached Century Litong, which links the two halves of the network.
Regulators were already watching Megaspeed before this report came out. Bloomberg reported last December that Megaspeed had imported at least $4.6 billion in Nvidia hardware since 2023, including more than 136,000 graphics processing units. U.S. and Singaporean authorities have also opened separate investigations into Megaspeed on suspicion that restricted Nvidia chips were being smuggled from Southeast Asia into China.
What Nvidia said
An Nvidia spokesperson told The Information that the company sells its data center GPUs mainly through established partners and works with them to make sure U.S. export controls are followed. According to the spokesperson, Nvidia holds every transaction to the same standards and expects its partners to meet them.
Nvidia also said its due diligence and its work with law enforcement have helped expose suspected attempts to get around export restrictions, and that this work has resulted in federal prosecutions.