[Edaily Reporter Jang Yeong-Rak ] Reports have emerged that U.S. intelligence agencies have identified Alice Huang, a Chinese businesswoman who was close to NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, as a spy working for China’s Ministry of State Security.

The New York Times (NYT) reported this on the 6th (local time), citing intelligence officials. According to the report, Alice Huang was recruited by the Ministry of State Security to gather information on U.S. AI semiconductors and to collect information from Jensen Huang in an effort to persuade him to supply NVIDIA products to China. U.S. intelligence agencies have been intensively investigating Alice Huang’s motives for approaching Jensen Huang, and Congress has also recently begun to take an interest in the matter. Three U.S. House committees have requested that Jensen Huang appear at closed-door hearings later this month.
Alice Huang has established relationships with senior industry executives, including management at Gigabyte—a supercomputer assembler and NVIDIA partner—and has attended industry conferences and private executive dinners.
Authorities began paying attention when Megaspeed, operated by Alice Huang, embarked on a multi-billion-dollar semiconductor procurement initiative in 2024. They suspected that the semiconductor purchase volume—which was unusually large for a company largely unknown in the industry—indicated that Megaspeed might be a shell company or acting as a middleman to smuggle prohibited items into China.
In fact, Alice Huang was connected to a network of companies and investors in the Shanghai and Zhejiang Province areas, and Megaspeed conducted business by building data centers in Southeast Asia and then leasing computing resources to the Chinese company Alibaba. Since importing the hardware was impossible, they enabled the use of NVIDIA technology in China via the cloud. U.S. intelligence agencies have determined that the network to which Alice Huang belongs is financially linked to Chinese military agencies, suggesting this is a state-sponsored operation involving intervention at the national level.
China’s Ministry of State Security has expanded in scale since President Xi Jinping took office and is now reported to have an operating budget larger than that of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Peter Mattis, a former CIA counterintelligence analyst, stated that Chinese intelligence agencies have long targeted technology as a key focus of their operations and speculated that this operation was part of that effort. It is unknown whether Jensen Huang was specifically aware of Alice Huang’s activities. However, while U.S. intelligence agencies sometimes conduct counterintelligence operations that involve notifying individuals who have become targets of espionage in advance, no such measures were taken regarding Jensen Huang.