[Edaily Reporter Bang Sung Hoon ] Reports have emerged that Alice Huang—the mistress of NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang and a woman accused of being a Chinese spy—was involved in smuggling over 10 trillion won worth of NVIDIA artificial intelligence (AI) chips into China by exploiting her relationship with CEO Huang. The shipment included a large number of chips that the U.S. had banned from export to China. As the scandal escalated, NVIDIA’s market capitalization evaporated by more than 570 trillion won in just two days.

According to Reuters on the 10th (local time), the U.S. IT news outlet The Information reported that day, citing two people familiar with Alice Huang, that the relationship between Jensen Huang and Alice Huang helped facilitate the shipment of at least $7.5 billion (approximately 10.0838 trillion won) worth of NVIDIA chips to Chinese companies.

According to the report, Alice Huang, along with her husband and younger sister, built a network of companies spanning China and Singapore to secure NVIDIA chips. At the center of this network was Shanghai Century Liting, a Chinese company established in June 2023. Just four months after its founding, in October of the same year, the company obtained NVIDIA’s “Preferred Cloud Partner” status, granting it priority access to chip supplies.

When chip orders were blocked by U.S. export controls, Alice Huang mobilized her connections at NVIDIA and among distributors to secure the supplies. As a result, approximately 240,000 chips—including H100s, H200s, and some A100s—were shipped to China. Century Liting operated data centers using even chips banned for sale to China and leased out computing power; some of these chips were used by Alibaba, Tencent, and small and medium-sized AI research institutes in China.

Alice Huang also served as an executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore-based company linked to Century Liting. Megaspeed was investigated by U.S. authorities for shipping NVIDIA chips from Southeast Asia to China. The Information reported that while Alice Huang built trust by leveraging her relationship with Jensen Huang, she kept her role ambiguous and left no paper trail. Reuters stated that it was unable to independently verify this report.

Nevertheless, Megaspeed has not yet been placed on the U.S. export blacklist. The Financial Times (FT) reported that while several U.S. government agencies have called for Megaspeed to be added to the Entity List, the Department of Commerce has been delaying the decision.

NVIDIA’s market capitalization fell by approximately $430 billion (about 578.135 trillion won) over two days. The stock price fell 9.5% after the affair came to light. CEO Jensen Huang holds a stake of about 3.6%, which does not grant him a majority of voting rights, and the company operates a flat organizational structure in which dozens of executives report directly to him, highlighting governance risks. However, Bank of America (BofA) assessed that “the allegations do not equate to proven business damage.”

NVIDIA’s outside directors appointed Jun Kim, an attorney at the law firm Wachtell, Lipton—and a former acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York—to lead the investigation. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is also conducting a separate investigation into whether CEO Jensen Huang has been targeted by foreign intelligence agencies.

Political sparring is also intensifying. The New York Times (NYT) reported that Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Marco Rubio briefed President Trump on the matter aboard Air Force One during a trip to China last May. This was at least the second such briefing in seven months. The White House denied the report.

President Trump said the previous day that he believes CEO Jensen Huang, noting that Huang “had no idea” that Alice Huang was a spy. He also said he was unaware of these allegations when he visited China with CEO Jensen Huang last May. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer urged the swift passage of legislation imposing restrictions on chip exports to China.