‘Jensen Huang’s woman’ assures investors: “No problem securing Nvidia chips”

[Financial News]  

It has been confirmed that Alice Huang, who admitted having an affair with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, assured Chinese investors that she could secure NVIDIA artificial intelligence (AI) chips. As she pursued a project to build a data center worth hundreds of millions of dollars in Southeast Asia based on her relationship with Jensen Huang, she reportedly assured them that securing NVIDIA GPUs (graphics processing units)—key to the project’s success—would pose no problem.
Financial Times (FT) reported on the 9th, local time, citing sources, that Alice Huang, whom U.S. intelligence agencies consider a Chinese spy, made these moves last year.
According to two investors who took part in negotiations at the time, Alice Huang and her business partner, Wei Kang, drew up plans for a data center in Southeast Asia and assured investors, “There will be no problem securing GPUs.” She also reportedly emphasized at the time that they had already lined up companies such as Alibaba as customers for the project.
Under U.S. export-control laws, Chinese companies may legally lease data centers overseas. However, they are not allowed to own the data center assets.
According to sources, however, Alice Huang did not disclose to investors when she met with them that she was close to Jensen Huang.
The U.S. government believes Alice Huang, a former executive at Singaporean data-center firm Megaspeed International, is a spy recruited by an intelligence agency of China’s Ministry of State Security.
Alice, whose Chinese name is Huang Le, is a Megaspeed International executive and a partner at Hexi Private Partners, a private equity fund established in 2010.
According to The New York Times (NYT), the U.S. Commerce Department has halted its investigation into allegations that Megaspeed was involved in semiconductor smuggling. The investigation was reportedly stopped after contact with NVIDIA.
The case has since been transferred to the U.S. Department of Justice, and a criminal investigation is underway. Megaspeed International is suspected of secretly exporting advanced NVIDIA AI chips to China.

[email protected] Song Kyung-jae Reporter