SINGAPORE-BASED tech group Megaspeed dealt in billions of dollars’ worth of the world’s most advanced AI chips, and its former director, Alice Huang, was this week outed as an alleged Chinese spy.
She was accused of having an affair with Nvidia co-founder Jensen Huang while digging up company secrets for Beijing.
Details about Alice Huang’s life are vague, making it almost impossible to pin down where she lives, where she works, or when she was born.
But her influence undoubtedly spreads far and wide, from the nondescript Singapore office, to hulking data centres in Southeast Asia, to the gleaming boardrooms of Silicon Valley.
Her connection to cloud computing firm Megaspeed sits at the centre of the scandal.
Megaspeed touts itself as a company at the heart of the AI revolution, using Nvidia’s advanced silicon chips to power high-performance computing inside vast data centres.
But it is also under investigation for serving a murkier purpose.
Megaspeed has allegedly helped Beijing skirt trade restrictions by sending Nvidia chips into China.
Beijing has denied allegations of spying, and Megaspeed said it was investigating if it had complied with export controls on the sensitive chips.
Singapore police opened an investigation in February 2025 into Megaspeed and other companies suspected of circumventing or violating export controls.
Alice Huang was interviewed as part of Singapore’s probe. Although no charges were laid, she was barred from the city-state in February 2026 for providing inaccurate information to “down-play her role in Mega-speed”.
A company linked to her acquired the Singapore arm of Chinese video game developer 7Road International in early 2023.
The 7Road name was then changed to Megaspeed International.
Huang was listed as a Megaspeed director for less than a year, taking the role between March and November 2023.
Her arrival coincided with a drastic change in fortunes, as Megaspeed pivoted from a little-known video game maker to one of Asia’s biggest buyers of Nvidia chips.
Over two years, Megaspeed reportedly traded in upwards of US$4 billion worth of Nvidia chips.
Megaspeed has a Malaysian subsidiary that struck a deal in 2024 pledging assets to Apex Enterprise Solutions in Singapore as security in case of contractual breaches.
In June 2025, US investigators turned up at Megaspeed to carry out a “post-shipment verification”, with Huang present, according to Singapore’s Home Ministry.
That same day, Huang was interviewed by Singapore police, who impounded her passport.
By then, she and Nvidia boss Jensen Huang had already been spotted together in public.
In one of their early outings together, they were seen mingling at an afterparty following the Computex trade show in Taiwan at the beginning of 2024.
The scandal has sparked national security fears.
China and the United States are fighting for supremacy in artificial intelligence, and Nvidia’s market-leading products have become a major point of contention.
Nvidia controls an estimated 90 per cent of the market for the chips used to train and run AI models, and the US imposed rules in 2022 to restrict their sales to China.
In any case, the restrictions appear to have been circumvented.
A Chinese university tied to the nation’s defence establishment was able to buy advanced Nvidia chips, according to procurement notices from October and September.
Alice Huang sits in the middle of a corporate web, connected to myriad shell companies, investment houses and major Chinese technology firms.
Corporate records filed in Hong Kong list her as a director of Nanjing Lingxing Technology, which operates the popular T3 ride hailing platform in China.
Other notable investors in Nanjing Lingxing Technology include Alibaba and Tencent, as well as state-backed carmakers like China FAW and Dongfeng Motor Group.
A corporate CV published by a Chinese investment firm details Huang’s rapid ascent through the ranks of Asian investment banking.
She served in a senior role at HSBC around 2012, the resume claims, before moving on to stints at CITIC Securities and Shanghai Hexi Investment.
She was born in China’s Hunan province, which she left to study media in Hong Kong, HK01 media reported. A CCTV reporter wrote on Weibo that she worked with Huang at the Chinese broadcaster, but later deleted the post.
The writers are from AFP