Suspected of working for Chinese intelligence, Alice Huang may have owned shares in Chinese companies that acted in the interests of Nvidia’s main competitor in the country, Huawei Corporation. This took place while she was doing business with Nvidia and was believed to be in a romantic relationship with its CEO Jensen Huang.
The connection between Alice Huang and Huawei was discovered by analysts at Tesari, a private company that conducts national security investigations around the world. Huawei enjoys broad support, including financial support from Beijing, thanks to which it can reduce prices and displace global competitors. In 2024, Nvidia recognized Huawei as one of its main competitors, especially in the field of artificial intelligence chips, including central processing units, graphics processing units, and networking equipment.
The connection between Alice Huang and Huawei is so convoluted that it may have been deliberately structured to hide the real nature of their relationship. In 2019, Huang, who lived in Hong Kong, sold her cloud company Osmanthus to Chinese game developer 7Road. In 2023, the Singapore division of 7Road was spun off into an independent structure called Megaspeed – Megaspeed subsequently became one of Nvidia’s key clients, ensuring the supply of chips from the American manufacturer to Chinese companies.
In 2016, Alice Huang became a co-owner of financial firm Shanghai Hexi, which actively invests in the technology sector and data centers. In 2021, Hexi acquired a 27% stake in data center development company Shanghai Century Longteng and held it until 2024. This company, in turn, owned a controlling stake (50.1%) in the data center operator Shenzhen Yifeng Technology Co. Ltd. in mainland China. The data center’s key customer was Huawei Cloud, a Shenzhen-based division of Huawei Technologies.
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Huang’s Hexi acted as guarantor for the loans needed to finance the Shenzhen data center, which collaborated with Huawei. It was not possible to determine whether the Shenzhen data center was able to obtain Nvidia GPUs; but its majority-owned company began purchasing these chips in 2023.
This company, Zhejiang Century Huatong Group, is a business partner of Alice Huang Hexi – they jointly own Century Longteng. Thus, Huang became a co-owner of the data center that provided computing power to Huawei – during the same period, she and Jensen Huang were first noticed together in public. And it is not clear why, given the availability of Chinese-made equipment, Huawei needed to rent computing power from a third party.
In 2024, Hexi withdrew from the shareholders of the developer of this data center, but people from Alice Huang’s circle are still associated with this facility in Shenzhen. Her husband Kang Wei is a longtime business partner and founder of Hexi; Huang herself previously held a leadership position in this company. In 2022, Kang Wei became one of the leaders of Century Longteng, which owns a controlling stake in the Shenzhen data center – he was also present at the signing of an agreement between this company and Huawei.
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