Alice Huang, the Chinese business executive and alleged Chinese spy whose affair with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has rocked the global technology industry and set off a swirl of questions from Beijing to the Oval Office, is seemingly a ghost.
Much of her background, from her age and hometown to her education and prior jobs, are unconfirmed. Attempts to verify information largely go unanswered — or raise new suspicions. Her current whereabouts are uncertain, and her social media accounts appear to have been deleted. Even her exact title at Megaspeed International, the Singapore-based customer of Nvidia, is not clear.
Bai Jie, a former news anchor in China with more than 2 million followers on the social media platform Weibo, said Monday that she had known Huang when they worked together as journalists.
“I already knew she was formidable back then,” Bai, who was previously employed at state television channel CCTV, wrote on Weibo.
Hours later, the post disappeared, and Bai, replying to confused users, denied making the statement. Soon after that, Bai’s account was banned from posting on Weibo.
Bai did not respond to requests for comment.
The Chinese government has denied that Alice Huang was a spy. President Donald Trump said Jensen Huang told him that he had no idea she was with Chinese intelligence. Jensen Huang, in a companywide letter, admitted to an extramarital affair, though he did not refer directly to Alice Huang.
Intelligence experts said Alice Huang’s biography appeared to fit with trademark spycraft.
Her background “smells like a legend to me, which is what we do in the CIA,” said Dennis Wilder, a former top China analyst for the CIA, who questioned whether parts of Huang’s résumé were embellished.
“This is all a little too mysterious,” Wilder said. “If she weren’t under suspicion, why take everything down?”
In their denial, Chinese officials called the allegations “purely unsubstantiated and directed at smearing China.”
Alice Huang began her career as a journalist at state broadcasters Hunan TV and CCTV before moving into finance, with stints at HSBC, the global banking firm based in London, and Chinese state-owned financial conglomerate CITIC, according to a Chinese private equity database site and a social media post by Shanghai Hexi Investment Management, another former employer.
But there is no public record so far of Huang working at either Hunan TV or CCTV. HSBC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Huang was born in rural Hunan province, according to reporting from the Financial Times. A Chinese financial news site, Caixin Global, reported that Huang is about 42 years old and obtained a master’s degree from a Hong Kong university. The Washington Post could not independently verify that information.
In the 2010s, Huang became deputy general manager of private equity firm Shanghai Hexi. The company was founded and chaired by Kang Wei, a graduate of Shanghai Jiao Tong University previously recognized as the youngest person to head a fund management company in China, according to a company bio.
According to some media reports, Kang and Huang were married. The Post has not been able to verify their relationship.
Around that time, Alice Huang was also listed as a legal representative for tech firm Shanghai Longteng. When reporters from The Post called Shanghai Longteng’s publicly listed phone numbers, they were told they had the wrong number.
It was Huang’s role at Megaspeed International, a little-known Singapore subsidiary of a Chinese gaming company, that drew U.S. scrutiny and might have brought her in contact with Jensen Huang.
After Alice Huang joined Megaspeed as a director in March 2023, the subsidiary spun off from its Chinese parent and pivoted to lending clients computing power from its data centers, which were powered by Nvidia chips.
Megaspeed’s assets swelled to $3 billion in 2024 from $33 million in 2023, according to corporate filings, raising suspicions among U.S. officials that the company was routing Nvidia’s cutting-edge chips to Chinese firms in violation of U.S. export controls.
Megaspeed did not bear the hallmarks of a front company of the Ministry of State Security (MSS), Beijing’s spy agency, said Victor Shih, a professor of Chinese politics at the University of California at San Diego, citing the billions of dollars in assets that went “beyond the typical scope of MSS operations.”
It was in Megaspeed’s capacity as a customer of Nvidia that Alice Huang began appearing in public with Jensen Huang, and they hid their relationship in plain sight.
Photographs posted on news sites and social media show the two together over the years sitting next to each other at a bar with other tech executives in Taipei in June 2024 and leaving a Taipei restaurant together in May 2025, with Alice Huang kissing Jensen Huang on the cheek.
At some point, Alice Huang was tapped by the MSS and she began a romantic relationship with Jensen Huang, according to U.S. intelligence reports. But the precise timing of these developments is not clear.
“There’s a sex scandal, an espionage issue, and then there is the issue of selling advanced computer chips to a company that seemingly does not exist, and they’re linked because [Alice Huang] was an executive at that company,” said Sam Bresnick, a fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, who studies U.S. competition with China.
She has not been seen in public nor made any statement since Jensen Huang admitted to an affair.
Huiyee Chiew and Rudy Lu in Taipei, Taiwan, and Lyric Li in Seoul contributed to this report.
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