Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s extramarital relationship with a Chinese businesswoman suspected of spying for Beijing contributed to the supply of the company’s chips to China worth at least $7.5 billion. To purchase Nvidia chips, Alice Huang, together with her husband and sister, created a network of companies in China and Singapore.
Image source: Brecht Corbeel / unsplash.com
At the center of the network was Shanghai-based Century Litong, founded in June 2023. By October, she received the status of a preferred cloud partner of Nvidia, which provided her with priority access to the company’s products. One of the founders of Century Litong was actually controlled by Alice Haun’s sister, Huang Yu, who left the company in 2024. When shipments of Nvidia chips stalled under U.S. export restrictions, Alice Huang used her connections at Nvidia and among distributors to secure supplies. As a result, about 240,000 units of H100, H200 accelerators and a number of A100 were imported into China.
Century Litong leased computing power and operated data centers with Nvidia accelerators, including those whose sales to China were prohibited. Some of these resources eventually ended up at the disposal of Alibaba, Tencent and small Chinese AI laboratories. Alice Huang also held a senior position at Singapore’s Megaspeed, which is associated with Century Litong. US authorities are currently investigating Megaspeed for shipping Nvidia products from Southeast Asia to China.
Megaspeed received Nvidia products and provided Chinese customers with access to computing power in Southeast Asian data centers or physically delivered equipment to China. Equipment purchased by Malaysian Speedmatrix (a subsidiary of Megaspeed established in 2024) was subsequently supplied to Century Litong. Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le, used her relationship with Jensen Huang to bolster her own authority while remaining unclear about her role and leaving no trace in the documents.
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