Traces of alleged spy Alice Huang’s past are vanishing from China’s internet â but a few details of her incredible rise from provincial town schoolgirl to Nvidia boss Jensen Huang’s alleged mistress have emerged.
Huang, 49, was remembered as a tall, soft-spoken woman with polished English and a gift for working a room, by someone who met her at an event in Beijing about three years ago.
“She was easygoing and very polite,” the source told the Post.
“Her English was very good, and [she] spoke quite softly. She was very sociable.”
Sources from her home province of Hunan told the Post Huang, was born in 1977 trained at a nursing school, worked at Hunan TV and state broadcaster CCTV, but mysteriously never held a staff job, and that she had been married in Hunan before she met Kang Wei, the stock analyst and investor who reportedly introduced her to Jensen Huang.
Huang, also known by her Chinese name Huang Le, is accused by US intelligence of being recruited by China’s Ministry of State Security to get close to the Nvidia chief, the Post reported. Beijing has denied the allegations and she has not been charged with any wrongdoing.
A former schoolmate claimed Huang was “good at drinking,” sociable and had a high EQ â also known as emotional intelligence â in a credible account which has been circulated in the Chinese community.
A WeChat group of her former junior high classmates was also mysteriously closed, according to Chinese sources.
Huangâs own WeChat account, where she posted photos with the Nvidia boss, has been disabled, the Financial Times reported. And China’s top AI chatbot, DeepSeek, refuses to answer questions about her.
Huang, also known by her Chinese name Huang Le, attended Jiangnan Middle School in Nanzhushan, a town in the city of Xiangtan, the Hunan source told the Post. It was once the school for the children of workers at the Jiangnan Machinery Factory.
A graduation photo circulating among Chinese contacts, attributed to a former classmate, is said to show Huang among the students of Class 9305.
From there, she went to a secondary vocational nursing school, according to the sourceâ a long way from the TV studios, investment firms and tech titans that would fill her later résumé.
The source believed she later studied for a bachelor’s degree at Hunan Normal University, but could not confirm if she finished it.
She soon traded nursing scrubs for the TV studio, working informally at Hunan TV and CCTV, the source said.
She later moved into finance, becoming a senior executive and equity partner at Shanghai Hexi Investment, which is where she is thought to have met Kang.
Huang and Kang Wei presented themselves as a married couple, according to a source who met her in person.
“They called each other husband and wife, but whether they were legally married or not, I can’t verify,” they said.
Kang allegedly knew Nvidia boss Jensen Huang through business they did together in the 2010s. Kang was then buying Chinese video game companies â Nvidia’s main chip business before the AI boom â and introduced Huang to him, according to The Information.
That would mean she had known the Nvidia boss for years before recent reports that claimed she met him while buying AI chips in 2024.
By 2023, Huang had a senior role at Megaspeed, a Singapore firm that went on to buy billions of dollars of Nvidia chips for data centers in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Megaspeed has denied allegations it diverted restricted chips to China, but investigations into them doing so have been launched in the US and Singapore.
Photos Huang shared on WeChat show dinners, drinks and her posing beside some of the most powerful men in tech.
At a Taipei whiskey bar in 2024, she allegedly fired off a text â and moments later Jensen showed up, socialized briefly then left alone, the Wall Street Journal reported.
If, and when, she became part of an intelligence operation are key questions investigators want to find out.
Her personal WeChat offers a clue to her rampant ambition. It reads “Stay foolish, stay hungry” âfamous advice attributed to Steve Jobs, but flipped in its order.
That hunger is exactly what Beijing looks for when it recruits people for intelligence operations.
“She’s obviously a tenacious worker, a tenacious businesswoman ⦠It appears that she molded herself into being a success,” Nicholas Eftimiades, a retired senior intelligence officer and author of the book “Chinese Espionage: Operations and Tactics” told the Post.
“In China, given the CCP’s control over society, if you want to be successful at that level, you’re probably going to play nicely with the CCP,” he added.
Eftimiades has built a database of more than 1,000 Chinese espionage cases. Unlike the CIA or Britain’s MI6, he said, China’s Ministry of State Security takes a “whole of society” approach, noting a 2017 law requiring Chinese citizens to support intelligence work.
The lure can be money, nationalism, personal relationships or, in rarer cases, coercion. But if Huang was compromised, he believes it would be related to business.
“It’s a natural movement for her to be cooperating with the CCP,” Eftimiades said. “And in this case, given her access to Jensen Huang, I’m sure they would have approached her and said, ‘OK, we could really use your help.’”
Not every spy starts out as one, Peter Mattis, a former CIA counterintelligence analyst and president of the Jamestown Foundation, noted to the Post this week. Foreign governments often seek to exploit relationships that already exist.
“If you trust someone, you talk to them about things that you might not talk about with other people,” Mattis said.
Eftimiades doesn’t see Huang as a trained operative. “Spies don’t do billion-dollar deals,” he said. “That’s a person who’s a cooperating asset.”
Nor does he buy the theory that she was simply a chip smuggler.
“If it’s things like technology or smuggling, you don’t go to the CEO,” he said. “I think what she was looking for is policy ⦠how [Nvidiaâs] board members feel, are they in favor of selling to China.”
“Intelligence work is like a cancer,” he added.
“Once you get one, then you start going out and saying, ‘OK, who can we target?’”
