Mark Anderson
At the heart of the biggest controversy confronting Nvidia in its three-decade history is a former television journalist who became a semiconductor power broker renting advanced chips to China’s top firms.
Huang Le, also known as Alice Huang, has been identified in a series of reports as a spy recruited by Beijing to target Nvidia’s chief executive officer Jensen Huang. She came into his orbit after founding Megaspeed International, the largest buyer of Nvidia’s chips in South-East Asia — a major route for smuggling the firm’s advanced hardware into China.
The CEO previously said there was nothing inappropriate about their relationship. But after intense speculation, Huang admitted on Sunday that he’d had an affair and said Nvidia’s board was launching an investigation.
As one of Silicon Valley’s biggest luminaries during the AI boom, Huang’s confession plunges Nvidia into a crisis that threatens to reverberate through the broader industry. After advocating for years to sell more of Nvidia’s AI processors to China, the world’s largest market for chips, Huang’s links to the country will come under greater scrutiny than ever before.
“This tech competition is really happening at the level of private companies, which are headed by CEOs,” former US intelligence analyst Elly Rostoum told Bloomberg TV. “This seems quite frankly quite careless.”
Huang’s admission raises questions about the woman who established and oversaw the incredible ascent of a then-nascent neocloud that rose to become one of Nvidia’s key partners in the regional data centre boom. Online posts and publicly available information have provided the broad contours of Megaspeed’s rise, and the critical role she played in it.
Huang Le 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. 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 $US4.6 billion. At multiple facilities in South-East Asia, the company rents Nvidia chips to Chinese tech giant Alibaba Group, 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, declined to comment at the time.
Last year, Bloomberg News was unable to reach Huang Le directly, including after several visits to her registered Hong Kong address in an attempt to secure her contact information from people present there.
Megaspeed told Bloomberg News that it denies any wrongdoing and said it abides by all regulations relevant to its operations, adding it was surprised by allegations that a former Megaspeed executive acted as a foreign intelligence asset.
Nvidia said in a statement that its board is launching an independent investigation “in light of recent reporting that founder and CEO Jensen Huang has been the target of a foreign intelligence effort.” The company previously said its inquiry into Megaspeed found no evidence of diversion and showed that the company is fully owned and operated outside of China, with no Chinese shareholders.
The New York Times reported last week that US officials had been briefed that Huang Le was working for Beijing’s Ministry of State Security as part of an effort to learn about American artificial intelligence chips and possibly persuade Nvidia to make its most sophisticated semiconductors available in China. She speaks English well and has relationships with executives at the highest levels of the AI chip industry, the newspaper reported.
It was not clear when or how she met Jensen Huang, though the pair was pictured together in 2024 at a tech conference in Taipei.
Singaporean police last year brought Huang Le in for questioning and barred her from leaving the country, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg News in December. Her current whereabouts are unknown.
Washington, meanwhile, was separately investigating Megaspeed over concerns that it may have been involved in smuggling hardware to China and asked Nvidia to make checks. Officials asked Nvidia to audit the firm last year over concerns surrounding its role in a vast smuggling operation.
While the chipmaker initially said the hardware was fully accounted for, Megaspeed had in fact imported 50,000 more chips than Nvidia found in its data centres, among other major discrepancies reported by Bloomberg News.
Nvidia also pledged in December 2025 to visit Megaspeed’s data centres again in the near future, but since then has repeatedly declined to say whether such checks have occurred.
Bloomberg News also found links between Megaspeed and a private equity firm called Shanghai Hexi, which is linked to a data centre that state media has said will be China’s largest. Huang Le was listed as one of Shanghai Hexi’s directors in an official company WeChat post in 2016.
Until August 2025, a holding company she founded owned a 48 per cent stake in the project. Shanghai Hexi and the holding company that Huang Le founded didn’t respond to multiple requests at the time.
Jensen Huang was asked last week to appear before a joint closed-door meeting with House committees on the chipmaker’s security protocols following the public reports about his interactions with Huang Le.
The session, requested by three lawmakers who head national security panels, is scheduled for November 18.
Bloomberg
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Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: www.smh.com.au
