The NVIDIA chips involved are banned in China.
A Chinese company with ties to Alice Huang procured NVIDIA AI chips banned in the country, which were then installed at a Shanghai AI facility that also has ties to Alice Huang, according to Bloomberg. The publication says the documents it has reviewed for its report shows explicit evidence that there’s a network of Chinese companies, which have managed to get their hands on NVIDIA chips that weren’t supposed to be sold in China, with Huang at the center.
US officials believe that Alice Huang is a spy recruited by China’s main intelligence agency to target NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang. The goal was apparently to learn more about America’s AI plans and to get Jensen Huang to persuade the US government to let his company ship its more advanced chips to China. Before he stepped down as CEO of NVIDIA, Jensen Huang reportedly admitted in a staff memo that he had an affair with Alice Huang.
To the public, Alice was an executive at Singaporean company Megaspeed, but the reports that had come out since the issue blew up paint a different picture of who she truly was. Bloomberg says the NVIDIA chips listed in the documents it reviewed were sold to Aperia Cloud Services, an NVIDIA Cloud Partner in Singapore. Aperia purchased 22 servers from Dell containing NVIDIA H800 chips, which are banned in China. According to the report, Dell cut off business ties with Aperia in February 2025 due to concerns around the deal.
Bloomberg found the hardware details in filings from a company called Shanghai Longteng Intelligent Computing, which was set up by Alice a decade ago. They were documented as part of the information the company had to submit to the Chinese government, since it was using its servers as a collateral for financing. While Alice hasn’t been part of Shanghai Longteng since 2017 — and the documents didn’t say if she was personally involved in the procurement of the chips — Huang Yu, who was identified as her sister, was the one who took over as majority owner. The filings also revealed that the company’s servers included 52 units made by Super Micro Computer Inc. Those units were equipped with NVIDIA’s H100 or H200 chips, which can’t be sold to Chinese companies without express permission from the US government.
The Shanghai AI facility where the smuggled NVIDIA units were installed is called the Yangtze River Delta Project, which Bloomberg says also has ties to Alice Huang. Its president is Kang Wei, who is being reported as Alice’s husband and the person who introduced her to Jensen Huang. Alice’s company Megaspeed also presented a rendering of the Yangtze River Delta Project to its investors in 2024 and claimed that it was its largest AI facility. Former NVIDIA-CEO Jensen Huang is due to testify before Congress this month, and it’s likely all of this information will be pored over by officials in the run-up to the event.
