China's DeepSeek Implicated in NVIDIA Scandal? Investment by Company Linked to Alice Huang

[Financial News] A claim has emerged in U.S. media that Chinese businesswoman Alice Huang, known as the mistress of former NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, has ties to Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) company DeepSeek. Sources claimed that Chinese companies linked to Alice Huang secretly invested in DeepSeek.
The Information, a U.S. technology news outlet, reported on the 12th (local time), citing anonymous sources, that DeepSeek introduced Chinese cloud-computing company Shanghai Century Litong and its parent company, Jiangsu Letal Electronics, to several investors during its second fundraising round, held from July to October. DeepSeek employees introduced the Litong Group at the event as a company that supplied large quantities of NVIDIA AI accelerators through the black market. According to the report, Litong invested in DeepSeek through multiple special-purpose vehicles (SPVs), and as a result, its name did not appear on DeepSeek's official shareholder register.
One of the investments was made through an SPV established by Beijing-based venture capital firm Monolith Management, now DeepSeek's third-largest shareholder. Letal Electronics invested 95 million yuan (about 19 billion won) in the SPV. The total amount Litong invested in DeepSeek has not been confirmed.
The Information previously reported on the 10th, citing sources, that Alice Huang had smuggled NVIDIA AI accelerators into China despite U.S. government export restrictions. The value of the smuggled goods is estimated at at least $7.5 billion (about 10 trillion won). A total of 240,000 high-performance NVIDIA AI accelerators—including the H100, H200 and A100—were reportedly smuggled into China or supplied there by Alice Huang through rentals.

Megaspeed International, a Singaporean company Alice Huang acquired in 2023, was identified as the channel for the smuggling. Alice Huang and her family used Megaspeed's Malaysian subsidiary, Speedmatrix, and Litong, which was established in June 2023, to bring NVIDIA accelerators whose export to China was prohibited into the country.
Litong, whose founding shareholders include Alice Huang's younger sister, Huang Yu, secured preferred cloud partner status with NVIDIA in October 2023, four months after its establishment, gaining priority access to AI accelerators. But when orders for NVIDIA products were halted or delayed because of U.S. export controls on China, Alice Huang stepped in and used her connections at NVIDIA and elsewhere to secure supplies.
The Information claimed that Alice Huang had never held shares in Litong or Letal Electronics or served as an executive at either company, but that, judging from various business deals involving Huang Yu and her husband, Kang Wei, Alice Huang herself also had close ties to them.
Meanwhile, DeepSeek raised a total of 105.5 billion yuan (about 21.1 trillion won) in its second funding round this year, with around 30 Chinese big tech companies and state-linked firms taking part. This is the largest-ever fundraising by a Chinese AI company.
DeepSeek, which develops large language models (LLMs), drew attention in early 2025 by claiming that its R1 model had performance comparable to the latest model from U.S. company OpenAI, while costing about one-eighteenth as much to develop. Earlier, in a keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in the United States in January, Jensen Huang described DeepSeek's R1 model as “a really interesting achievement” and said, “Very satisfying.”
  


[email protected] Park Jong-won Reporter