‘Alice Huang’ in the Jensen Huang scandal reportedly a 42-year-old Hong Kong permanent resident

[Financial News] Global attention is focused on the whereabouts of 42-year-old Chinese national Alice Huang (Chinese name: Huang Le), whose espionage scandal wiped about 258 trillion won off NVIDIA’s market capitalization on the 9th (local time). Western media have noted that her entire background is unclear.
The U.S. Wall Street Journal (WSJ), citing two sources on the 9th, reported that Alice Huang was in China early this year but that her whereabouts have been unknown since. According to her publicly available résumé, she is from China’s Hunan Province and reportedly obtained permanent residency in Hong Kong after completing a master’s program in media management at Hong Kong Baptist University.
Alice Huang later worked as a broadcast journalist for about four years at China Central Television (CCTV) and Hunan Television. She is also said to have served as a director at multinational investment bank HSBC and as vice president of China’s state-owned CITIC Group, and to have worked in asset management for eight years. In 2016, she served as an executive director at the Chinese private equity firm ‘Heosi Investment.’ However, U.S. media reported that they could not verify Alice Huang’s employment history.
Earlier, the Chinese gaming company ‘SevenRoad’ established a subsidiary in Singapore in 2015. Alice Huang acquired the subsidiary in 2023, changed its name to ‘Megaspeed International,’ and turned it into an AI cloud provider. As the company’s controlling shareholder, she served as a registered director from March to November that year. Alice Huang is believed to have imported NVIDIA AI equipment worth at least $4.6 billion (about 6.2 trillion won) through Megaspeed International’s Malaysian subsidiary, ‘Speedmatrix.’ The U.S. government has been investigating since 2024 amid suspicions that Megaspeed International may have smuggled into China NVIDIA AI equipment whose export to China is banned.
According to the Financial Times (FT), early last year Alice Huang pitched investments in Southeast Asian data centers to Chinese investors, claiming there would be no problem obtaining NVIDIA AI equipment. China’s Alibaba Group was also a major customer of Megaspeed International and provided a loan to Speedmatrix in June 2024. Under current U.S. regulations, Chinese companies may lease computing capacity at overseas data centers, but are prohibited from directly owning data center assets equipped with certain U.S. products, including advanced NVIDIA AI accelerators. In July and August last year, Alice Huang established two new companies in Hong Kong and was listed as the sole director and shareholder of both. Meanwhile, the Singaporean outlet The Straits Times reported on the 10th that Megaspeed International’s office had been closed since October last year and was no longer answering calls.
[email protected] Park Jong-won Reporter