Why Jensen Huang Is Afraid of Her

Taipei, May twenty twenty-five. Jensen Huang is at his favourite restaurant, and the woman beside him is in a pink dress. They pose for a photo with their arms around each other, and she kisses him on the cheek. When dinner ends, he stops at the door to say goodbye to a client. She doesn't wait for him. She gets into his car, and they leave together. Her name is Alice Huang, or Huang Le, or Alice Wong. US intelligence says China's spy service sent her. And last Sunday, Jensen Huang admitted to his whole company that he'd been unfaithful to his wife. But nobody can say who she was before she met him. Her résumé says she was a TV reporter, and the TV station has never heard of her. Her company had five million dollars in the bank, and it bought four point eight billion dollars' worth of his chips. A Wall Street firm traced that money to Alibaba, Jack Ma's company. And now she's gone. This is the woman who got inside Nvidia, and the reason Jensen Huang is afraid of her. On Sunday his own board opened an inquiry, and Congress wants him in a closed room in Washington on the eighteenth of November, to explain her. We have to go back to before she was Alice Huang. Her résumé is on a website for China's fund industry, under her Chinese name, Huang Le, with her photograph at the top. It says she was a reporter at Hunan TV and at CCTV, China's state broadcaster, then a banker at HSBC and at CITIC Securities, and then a director of a Shanghai investment fund. Under education, it says "other." AFP finds the profile and can't work out who put it together. CCTV's website has no trace of her, HSBC and CITIC won't comment, and the New York Times, which reported the same career, says it couldn't verify parts of it. Nobody has published when she was born, where she grew up, or where she went to school. Only the last line on the résumé checks out. China's register of fund managers lists Huang Le as a director of that fund, Hexi Investment. And Hexi is in the files of China's stock market regulator. Shanghai, twenty fourteen. Hexi is run by a former star analyst, and one of its investors that autumn controls a big Chinese router maker. He wants a small listed company to take over and use as a shell for his own business. Over ten months, Hexi raises more than one point eight billion yuan and buys up that company's shares without telling the market. The broker on the other side of Hexi's biggest deal is CITIC Securities, the firm on her résumé. In twenty sixteen, her own new company buys forty-eight percent of Hexi. In twenty eighteen, the regulator fines Hexi and its boss more than eighteen million yuan. Huang Le's name isn't anywhere in the decision. No regulator or court has ever found that she did anything wrong. The router businessman, Gu Guoping, later gets life in prison for a separate fraud with more than a million victims. By then, Huang Le has sold a company of her own, for a billion yuan. Hong Kong, August twenty nineteen. 7Road, a Chinese video-game company listed there, announces that it's buying a games business from Shanghai. The business sits at the bottom of a chain of offshore companies, all named after trees. The one at the top is Maple Vale, and the filing says it belongs to "Ms. Huang Le, a Hong Kong permanent resident." It's the same Chinese name as on the fund register, and the New York Times traced Alice Huang to a Shanghai fund that invested in 7Road. 7Road also has a small company in Singapore. Three and a half years later, she buys it. Singapore, March twenty twenty-three. Her own offshore company takes over 7Road's Singapore arm, renames it Megaspeed, and makes her its managing director. Megaspeed's business is renting out computing power for AI, which means it needs Nvidia's chips. Eight months later, she hands the whole company to a brand-new Singapore firm, and her name comes off the register. The only director left is a Singaporean named Tan Yong Pong, and when the Straits Times later goes looking for him, nobody can find him. Four days after her name comes off, according to Bloomberg's review of the filings, Megaspeed becomes an official Nvidia Cloud Partner. So everything Megaspeed buys from here on, it buys with her name off its papers. But she hasn't gone anywhere. Taipei, June twenty twenty-four, seven months later, in Computex week. The Opera Sky Bar is fifteen floors above the city. A tech company called NetThunder posts photos of a late night here on LinkedIn, and Taiwan's EBC will later match them to this room. Jensen Huang is in them, and the caption names the woman beside him: "Megaspeed Chairwoman Alice Wong." Her name is off Megaspeed's papers, and here she's introduced as its chair, under a name that isn't on any of them. According to the host, Jensen is only at that table because of a bet she made, and we'll come back to it. At the end of twenty twenty-three, Megaspeed has five point seven million dollars in cash. From June twenty twenty-four, its company in Malaysia starts buying servers. Over the next twenty months, trade records reviewed by the New York Times show it buying at least four point eight billion dollars' worth of AI equipment built on Nvidia's chips. In twenty twenty-four alone, two point nine billion dollars is paid into Megaspeed as deposits, and its accounts don't say who paid it. This is a company with two people in its Singapore office and its equipment still sitting in the boxes in Malaysia. One of the customers renting its computing, the Financial Times reports, is Alibaba. And the month the buying starts, a Singapore company called Apex takes a pledge over everything the Malaysian company owns, then goes on to pay out more than four billion dollars. A short seller will later say Apex belongs to Alibaba, which would mean Alibaba was paying for the servers it was renting. Finance, at heart, is about credit. We must get rid of the pawnshop mentality in finance today. In October twenty twenty, Jack Ma tells a conference in Shanghai that China's state banks think like pawnshops. Ten days later, his finance company's stock market debut, set to be the biggest ever, is called off two days before trading starts. Jack Ma criticized Beijing and disappeared for two years. While he's gone, Alibaba gets the biggest antitrust fine in China's history, and then the state takes a golden share in one of its companies, with a say over its board. So if Alibaba paid, whose money was it, really? Taipei, the twenty-second of May twenty twenty-five, his last night in Taiwan for Computex. It's raining hard, and he goes anyway to San Liu Shi Fu, a small private kitchen down a lane, run by a former state-banquet chef. He's eaten here at least four times. Taiwanese TV has followed him live all week, and its cameras are already out in the lane, filming through the glass. The table sits close enough to the glass that the cameras can see everyone at it. It's his own dinner, and his daughter Madison, a senior director at Nvidia, is at the table with her boyfriend, who's now her husband. Through dinner, according to Mirror Media, Alice Huang sits talking happily with Madison. Madison picks up her phone and takes photos of everyone. At one point Alice Huang puts a hand on Jensen's shoulder and whispers in his ear. The pose and the kiss from the start of this film are on the same tape. Before he leaves, he comes out with a white plastic bag and hands out fried rice and fried noodles to the reporters waiting in the rain. They make delicious food. It's really so delicious. "So delicious," he tells them, in Taiwanese. His bodyguards walk them out, and while he turns to say goodbye to a client, she gets into the car ahead of him. Nobody has reported where the car went, and nothing about what happens between them in private has been made public. On the news that night, the story is the fried rice. On the thirteenth of May twenty twenty-six, a firm called Culper Research publishes forty pages on Nvidia. Culper is a short seller, which means it makes money when a stock falls, and it says up front that it's betting against this one. It's the day before Trump's summit in Beijing, and Jensen is going with him. Culper says Nvidia's chips are reaching China through middlemen in Southeast Asia, and it calls Megaspeed the tip of the iceberg. It says Alibaba secretly financed Megaspeed through shell companies. And it names Alice Huang, and calls her relationship with Jensen uncomfortably close. A current Megaspeed employee tells Culper that Jensen visits its data centers every few months, that people from Alibaba turn up around each visit, and that Alice Huang is still "our boss." The report says nothing about an affair, and nothing about spying. Nvidia's answer is that its checks found Megaspeed run from outside China, with no Chinese shareholders, which covers who owns the shares but not who sent the money. Megaspeed says it follows every law, American export rules included, and that inspectors from Washington, Malaysia and Nvidia itself found nothing wrong. Nobody has proven that Alibaba paid for any of it, and nobody has shown that any of the chips reached China. A few finance blogs pick the report up, and it goes no further. By then, American intelligence has already spent about a year listening to her. What it hears goes into a classified memo that reaches the top of the American government that spring. The year before, Bloomberg had listed her among the people working with Singapore's police on their Megaspeed investigation. Then, on Thursday the twenty-ninth of October, her name is everywhere. US intelligence officials have concluded, the New York Times reports, that she'd been recruited by the Ministry of State Security, China's spy service. Her job, in their finding, was to learn what she could about Jensen Huang, and to push him toward letting China buy more advanced chips. The next day, the Wall Street Journal reports that Singapore's intelligence agency had suspected her too. On Saturday the thirty-first, Singapore's Ministry of Home Affairs answers. It says neither the government nor its officials made those claims, "and there were no such investigations conducted in respect of Alice Huang." Its police are investigating Megaspeed. Singapore doesn't enforce other countries' export rules, the ministry adds, but it has charged four people and four companies with cheating the suppliers of servers. There are three ways to read the same record. The first is Washington's: an asset recruited by China's spy service to get close to one man. Three House committee chairs have put that in writing, calling her a publicly reported intelligence asset of China. The second comes from Chinese commentators reading her filings in order: the fined fund, the billion-yuan sale, then a Singapore company buying billions in servers. They see what Chinese finance calls a white glove, someone who fronts big money for people who'd rather not be seen holding it. The third reading is a bit of both. Britain's Tom Tugendhat told the BBC he wouldn't be surprised if Beijing had enlisted her only after the affair began, and that threatening her family to keep her in line wouldn't be beyond the Chinese state. The report is groundless speculation, purely a smear against China. China's foreign ministry calls the reports baseless smears. She has never been charged with anything, anywhere. Jensen Huang has four reasons on the record to be afraid of her. The first is his job. His board's inquiry is led by its independent directors with lawyers from outside, and Fortune expects it to look at his own earlier statements. Analysts call him a key-person risk, because a company worth trillions has no named successor. On Monday, in overnight trading, Nvidia loses more than four percent while other chip stocks climb. The second is what she knows. For at least a year she was close to him in private. Mark Trott, a former FBI agent, says hostile spy services have no qualms about using intimate relationships to get what they want. That's how a honey trap works: whatever the target shares with the woman, her handlers can have too. Nvidia's board sees no reason to think any secrets were compromised. The third is that he can't reach her. Jensen has said she no longer works at Megaspeed. By Sunday, Megaspeed was no longer on Nvidia's list of preferred partners. She hasn't said a word since her name came out, and nobody knows where she is. The fourth is the room. Three House committees want his answer by Wednesday the eleventh, and want him behind that closed door on the eighteenth. On the twenty-ninth of October, his first answer was this. Bloomberg News reports that NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang says his company's dealings with Megaspeed are, quote, normal and not unusual. Ten days later, he wrote to everyone at Nvidia that he had cheated on his wife, and that it had hurt her and their children. Since she couldn't attend today's event, our answers are limited. We'll move on to the next part. On Monday, Madison cancels her trip to an Nvidia event in Seoul, and when reporters there ask why, Nvidia won't answer. The night the cameras caught them, she got into his car first, and now he's the one left to answer for her in Washington. A year before the dinner in the rain, she made a bet. Back at the Opera Sky Bar in June twenty twenty-four, it's after midnight. NetThunder's table of tech executives is still drinking, and Alice Huang is sitting among them. She tells the table she'll bet them she can get Jensen Huang here tonight. In Computex week, every camera in Taipei is chasing him. Then the door opens, and he walks in with two of his executives and sits down with them. That's the photo NetThunder puts on LinkedIn. About a year and a half later, the Times reports, the President of the United States is briefed on her, and Jensen Huang says nobody ever told him. So why did nobody warn him?