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The Huang affair: A Chinese honey trap, or simple infidelity by Nvidia CEO?

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Trump was reportedly briefed on the intelligence six months earlier but took no major action, while administration officials remain divided over whether Jensen Huang knew Alice Huang’s true identity

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang with Alice Huang in a bar in Taipei after a technology trade show in June 2024. (via LinkedIn)

Was it a Chinese honey trap, or just a case of infidelity by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang?

On Sunday, Jensen Huang admitted he had been unfaithful to his wife following reports about having an affair with Alice Huang.

The New York Times previously reported that US intelligence agencies had concluded that Alice Huang was working for Chinese intelligence. However, the report relied on anonymous sources, and it has not been independently confirmed whether she was actually a Chinese spy or whether confidential information at Nvidia was leaked.

At the center of the controversy is Megaspeed, the Singapore-based data center company where Alice Huang once worked.

Megaspeed reportedly traces its origins to 7Road, a gaming and cloud computing company founded in Shenzhen, China, in 2008. A Singapore subsidiary of 7Road established in 2015 was renamed Megaspeed in 2023 and subsequently focused on AI cloud computing and data centers.

In November of that year, Megaspeed was reportedly sold to a company registered in the British Virgin Islands with ties to Huang Le, which is Alice Huang’s Chinese name. Four days later, Megaspeed was designated an Nvidia cloud partner.

Alice Huang is said to have previously worked for China’s Hunan Television and CITIC Bank, although those claims have not been verified. Before joining Megaspeed, she was an executive director at a Shanghai-based private equity fund involved in building a large-scale data center for Tencent. That same fund also reportedly invested in a cybersecurity subsidiary of China Electronics Technology Group Corporation (CETC), a major Chinese defense contractor.

Since 2024, Megaspeed has purchased more than US$4.8 billion worth of Nvidia chips, making it one of the company’s largest customers in Southeast Asia.

Its purchasing channel has raised questions, however. Megaspeed bought approximately US$2 billion worth of chips through its subsidiary Speedmatrix, placing orders not directly with Nvidia but through Aivres Systems, the US subsidiary of China’s Inspur.

Inspur was placed under US sanctions in 2023 over allegations that it supported supercomputing operations for the Chinese military. But Aivres was reportedly able to buy the chips under existing regulations because it was incorporated in the US.

It was around this time that Jensen Huang and Alice Huang began appearing together in public. In June 2024, after attending a technology trade show in Taipei, Taiwan, Jensen Huang was photographed sitting beside her at a local bar while drinking whiskey with executives from client companies.

A year later, the two attended a dinner with other executives from their companies at a Taipei restaurant. Local media reported that they placed their arms around each other’s waists while posing for a commemorative photograph — and that Alice gave Jensen a peck on the cheek.

Authorities in the US and Singapore began to scrutinize both Megaspeed’s suspicious chip purchases and the meetings between the two Huangs, who are unrelated. The ultimate destination of the Nvidia chips that Megaspeed was purchasing lay in a gray area of uncertain legality.

The New York Times raised the possibility that Megaspeed shipped the chips to data centers in Malaysia and Indonesia to provide remote computing services to Chinese customers — an arrangement that could potentially violate US export controls.

The newspaper also reported that when an official from the US Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security visited Megaspeed’s data center in Malaysia in September 2024, Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs) were still in their boxes, raising suspicions that they might be intended for reexport.

Nvidia maintains that investigators have already looked into allegations of exporters circumventing US restrictions and found them to be groundless.

US authorities began quietly looking into Megaspeed last year. The inquiry became public in October 2025, when The New York Times reported that the Commerce Department was investigating whether the company had evaded US export controls. Singapore police opened their own investigation. By then, the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party had already launched a probe, in April 2025, into Nvidia’s sales in China and Southeast Asia.

More than a year later, on Oct. 29, the Times reported that US intelligence agencies had concluded that Alice Huang was a spy who helped route Nvidia chips to China through other countries and passed information to Beijing. While monitoring her, intelligence officials also learned of her close personal relationship with Jensen Huang, according to the report.

The Times said officials did not believe Jensen Huang knew who Alice Huang really was. Some senior officials in the Trump administration, however, believe he could not have been unaware, the paper reported. President Donald Trump was also reportedly briefed on the intelligence six months earlier but took no particular action.

Both the Chinese government and Megaspeed deny the allegations.

By Jung E-gil, senior staff writer

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]

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