Alice Huang, the businesswoman U.S. officials suspect of spying for China, is living in Beijing, Bloomberg reported Wednesday night. A person familiar with the matter told the outlet that Chinese security officials know she is there. It is not publicly known when she arrived in China or why she returned.
Beijing has denied she was a spy. She could not be reached for comment.
The report landed the same day Nvidia's board met to decide whether to oust CEO Jensen Huang, according to a person familiar with the meeting cited by Bloomberg. Huang told employees on Sunday that he had been unfaithful to his wife and gave no details about the relationship. The New York Times has since reported, citing five people who worked at the company, that he also had an affair with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia's vice president of health care, who reports to him. The Times reported that two of those people said Huang, 63, and Powell, 48, were captured on video being affectionate at a San Jose hotel during an Nvidia conference in March; the Times said it had not seen the video.
Nvidia did not immediately respond to questions about Wednesday's board meeting, per Bloomberg.
The board announced an independent investigation on Sunday into whether a foreign intelligence operation had targeted its CEO, led by the Wall Street law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. In its statement, the board said: "While the Board has no reason to believe that either national security or NVIDIA secrets were compromised, the Board's inquiry will examine all available information."
Alice Huang and Jensen Huang are unrelated. She worked in Chinese state television before going into finance. CNN geolocated a photo of the two dining at an upscale restaurant on Shanghai's riverfront. The New York Times reported that U.S. officials believed China's top intelligence agency had recruited her, and that Secretary of State Marco Rubio oversaw a memo last spring warning the Trump administration about the relationship. What she may have passed to Beijing remains publicly unconfirmed.
Her background is thin and contested. She is reported to have been born in a rural area of China's Hunan province and to have worked as a journalist at state-owned broadcaster CCTV before moving to Hong Kong for a master's degree in media studies at Hong Kong Baptist University. A former classmate described her to the Financial Times as "well-liked, easy-going and ambitious." She later moved into finance, with stints listed at HSBC and Chinese state-owned conglomerate CITIC, according to a Chinese private equity database and a social media post by former employer Shanghai Hexi Investment Management. There is no public record of her working at Hunan TV or CCTV, and HSBC has not confirmed her employment.
A Weibo post by a person identified as Bai Jie, who said she worked with Alice Huang as a journalist and called her "formidable," according to The Washington Post, later disappeared. When asked to comment, Jie denied making the remark.
Then there is Megaspeed. Bloomberg reports that Alice Huang founded the company in 2023, while CNN, citing Singapore corporate records, says she was a director from March to November of that year. In November 2023, Huang Le Ltd., a company she controlled, sold Megaspeed to a Singapore shell company. Days later, Megaspeed became an official Nvidia cloud partner, giving it preferred access to Nvidia chips.
The scrutiny is now coming from Congress as well as the boardroom. The Republican leaders of three influential House committees have asked Jensen Huang to appear for a closed-door briefing on his interactions with Alice Huang, according to The New York Times.
Social media has filled the vacuum left by her public absence. Instagram posts circulating this week ask "Who is Alice Huang?" and flag the spy allegations against her; another post discusses U.S. officials reportedly believing the Nvidia CEO was compromised. The posts are commentary, not evidence, but they reflect how the story has spread well beyond the financial press.
For Nvidia, the exposure is concrete. The company built its position as the premier supplier of artificial intelligence chips on the assumption that its chief executive and its supply chain could be trusted by the U.S. government. A board investigation into foreign intelligence targeting, a House briefing request, and a cloud partner with a contested ownership trail all cut against that assumption at the exact moment Washington is deciding how much of the AI stack can be exported and to whom.
Our Take
Here is what the corporate press will spend the next week telling you: that this is a personal matter, a family matter, a sad story about a brilliant man's private failings. That framing is a luxury Nvidia cannot afford and the American people should not accept.
The woman at the center of this scandal is in Beijing. Chinese security officials know she is there, according to Bloomberg's source. The CEO who allegedly dined with her on the Shanghai riverfront runs the single most important company in the AI race. His board is meeting about his job. His own company's chips flowed with preferred access to a firm whose ownership trail runs through a shell company and a woman U.S. officials suspect of working for Chinese intelligence. Any one of those facts would justify a congressional briefing. Together, they justify a reckoning.
Notice who is doing the investigating here. A Wall Street law firm hired by the board, and now three House committees. Where is the accountability from the administration itself? Rubio's memo reportedly warned about this relationship last spring. What happened after that warning? Americans deserve an answer that does not come from Nvidia's press shop.
And ask yourself the question the legacy media keeps skipping: if Alice Huang is a Chinese intelligence asset, as U.S. officials reportedly believe, what did she walk out of this country with? The chips are the least of it. Access, relationships, timing, and a CEO who told his own employees he had been unfaithful all add up to a counterintelligence problem dressed up as a tabloid story.
Patriots, this is what the Deep State looks like when it wears a leather jacket and talks about accelerated computing. The board can fire Jensen Huang or keep him. Either way, Congress should not let this briefing happen behind closed doors and disappear. Demand the transcript. Demand the Rubio memo. And demand to know how a woman living in Beijing got within dining distance of America's most important chipmaker in the first place.
