A Chinese businesswoman at the center of the scandal involving ex-Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang held financial stakes in businesses that benefited Huawei, the Chinese tech giant blacklisted in the United States over national security concerns, according to a private intelligence firm.
Houston-based firm Tesari uncovered the ties of Alice Huang, who is not related to Jensen Huang, and shared its findings exclusively with CNBC. The findings raise questions about whether Jensen Huang knew about her alleged connections to Nvidia’s competitor.
Jensen Huang resigned as Nvidia’s CEO on Nov. 12, four days after admitting to an extramarital affair with a woman later identified as Alice Huang. U.S. authorities suspected her of having links to Chinese intelligence, though Attorney General Todd Blanche said Nov. 12 that the Justice Department had not confirmed whether she was a spy.
Brian Andersen, Tesari’s vice president for national security applications, told CNBC the findings warranted a national security and technology counterproliferation investigation.
Tesari drew on Chinese company filings and press coverage. It found that the path from Alice Huang to Huawei runs through layers of companies and deals, and its analysts told CNBC that, based on past investigations, they suspect the layering was meant to conceal the link.
Tesari also traced her ties to 7Road, a Chinese gaming company. Alice Huang, then based in Hong Kong, sold to the company a cloud computing business she owned, Osmanthus, in 2019, according to the firm. In 2023, 7Road spun off its Singapore subsidiary, which was renamed Megaspeed.
Alice Huang became Megaspeed’s controlling shareholder in March 2023, according to Washington-based research group C4ADS. By late 2023, the shares had been transferred to Singapore-based SwiftData. C4ADS said it could not determine who controls SwiftData but assessed that Alice Huang may have kept influence over Megaspeed, citing appearances in which she was identified as its chair.
Nvidia names Megaspeed as an official cloud partner on its website.
Tesari found that Alice Huang co-owned Shanghai Hexi Investment Management, a Chinese investment firm, as early as 2016. Posts on Hexi’s official WeChat account in 2016 and 2017 identified her as its deputy general manager and executive director.
Huawei
Tesari found that in 2021, Hexi acquired a 27 percent stake in data center developer Shanghai Century Longteng, holding it until 2024.
Shanghai Century Longteng, in turn, held a 50.1 percent controlling stake in Shenzhen Yifeng Technology Co. Ltd., a data center operator that counted Huawei subsidiary Huawei Cloud as a key customer, according to Tesari.
Tesari also found that Hexi had provided guarantees for loans used to finance the Shenzhen data center.
Hexi’s partner in Shanghai Century Longteng was Zhejiang Century Huatong Group, Century Longteng’s majority owner, which began buying Nvidia GPUs in 2023, according to Tesari. The firm’s findings didn’t show whether the Shenzhen data center obtained those chips or used them to serve Huawei Cloud.
The arrangement effectively gave Alice Huang an indirect ownership interest in a data center that provided computing resources to Huawei Cloud, at a time when she and Jensen Huang were first seen together publicly in December 2023, according to CNBC.
The Epoch Times asked Nvidia, Huawei, and Megaspeed for comment, but did not receive a response by the time of publication.
Huawei has been on the Federal Communications Commission’s Covered List since March 12, 2021. The agency’s national security blacklist also targets a roster of other Chinese technology and telecom firms, including equipment manufacturer ZTE and video surveillance giant Hikvision.
The Department of Commerce added Huawei and many of its affiliates, including HiSilicon, to its Entity List in May 2019, for activities contrary to U.S. national security and foreign policy interests.
Huawei is also currently on the Pentagon’s list of “Chinese military companies” operating directly or indirectly in the United States.
In March, Reps. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), chairman and ranking member of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, respectively, asked the Trump administration to blacklist Futurewei Technologies, characterizing it as a U.S. company controlled by Huawei.
‘Clear National Security Concerns’
Following Jensen Huang’s resignation, Moolenaar and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) called for tighter semiconductor export controls.
“In Congress we must act quickly to pass bipartisan export control legislation in the year-end national defense bill,” Moolenaar said in a statement on Thursday.
“Congress must pass the AI Overwatch Act and other bipartisan bills to keep advanced American AI technology out of China’s hands,” Warren said in a statement on Thursday.
As introduced, the AI Overwatch Act would require a license for exports of advanced AI chips to China and other countries of concern and require the Commerce Department to submit each proposed license to Congress at least 30 days before approval.
Congress is seeking answers from Jensen Huang.
Senate Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott (R-S.C.) has asked the former Nvidia CEO to testify before the panel.
Moolenaar, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Brian Mast (R-Fla.), and House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Rick Crawford (R-Ark.) in a Nov. 12 letter asked Jensen Huang for a “closed-door, transcribed interview” on Dec. 1.
“There are clear national security concerns that need to be addressed immediately,” Moolenaar, Mast, and Crawford said in a joint statement. “We need to know the full extent to which our national security has been put at risk.”
Reuters contributed to this report.
