Alice Huang's China web led straight to Huawei, Nvidia's top rival

Private intelligence firm Tesari uncovered the connection and handed its findings exclusively to CNBC. The firm, which uses artificial intelligence to gather evidence and specializes in national security investigations, says Alice Huang simultaneously owned stakes in Chinese businesses that benefited Huawei while she was in business with Nvidia and reportedly having a romantic affair with ousted CEO Jensen Huang. Nvidia named Huawei a top competitor in 2024, specifically in AI chips including graphics processing units, central processing units and networking chips.

The paper trail is tangled. Chinese corporate records and media reports compiled by Tesari show Alice Huang, whose Chinese name is Huang Le, sold a cloud business called Osmanthus to Chinese gaming company 7Road in 2019. A Singapore-based 7Road subsidiary was spun off as Megaspeed in 2023, and Megaspeed went on to become a key Nvidia customer, helping facilitate at least $7.5 billion in Nvidia chip shipments to Chinese firms, according to The Information.

As early as 2016, Alice Huang had also become co-owner of a financial firm called Shanghai Hexi, which invests heavily in tech and data centers. In 2021, Hexi acquired 27% of Shanghai Century Longteng, a data center developer, and held the stake until 2024. Century Longteng in turn owned a controlling 50.1% of Shenzhen Yifeng Technology, a mainland China data center whose key customer was Huawei Cloud. Hexi also guaranteed the loans financing that data center.

The timing is what Tesari zeroed in on. That data center was providing computing power to Huawei around the same stretch when Alice Huang and Jensen Huang were first publicly seen together, in December 2023. It isn't clear whether the Shenzhen facility could get Nvidia GPUs, but its majority owner, Zhejiang Century Huatong Group, began buying the chips in 2023. Century Huatong is a business partner of Hexi through their joint ownership of Century Longteng.

Brian Andersen, Tesari's vice president for national security applications and a former supervisory special agent with Homeland Security Investigations, said the activity warrants scrutiny. If the Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security and Homeland Security Investigations found anyone moved controlled equipment to Huawei without authorization, possible charges could include export-control violations, conspiracy and smuggling, he said. Tesari analysts told CNBC the structure was so convoluted they suspect it was built to deliberately obscure the relationship.

Hexi exited its stake in the data center developer in 2024, but people in Alice Huang's orbit remain tied to the Shenzhen facility. Her husband, Kang Wei, founded Hexi, where she previously held an executive role, and became an executive of Century Longteng in 2022. He also attended the company's signing of the Huawei agreement. Nvidia, Huawei, Jensen Huang, Alice Huang and Hexi did not respond to CNBC's requests for comment.