Born in Hunan, Huang first worked as a television journalist for Chinese state media channels China Central Television and Hunan TV before studying in Hong Kong in the mid-2000s and receiving a Master of Social Science in media management from Hong Kong Baptist University. She worked in HSBC Hong Kong and CITIC Securities, before joining Hexi Capital in 2015. There, she became intimately associated with the technology figure Kang Wei, formerly the youngest hedge fund chief executive in China. Many sources at the time assumed that the two were married because she introduced him as her husband during several social functions. Later reporting stated they are married. During the 2020s, Huang and Kang moved towards cloud computing. In March 2023, Huang became the controlling shareholder of the Singapore-based Megaspeed. Alibaba Group quickly became the biggest client of Megaspeed. The company also established partnership with Nvidia, allowing Chinese tech companies including Alibaba Group to access data centres in Southeast Asia with Nvidia chips.
Prior to 2025, she was most notable for being an independently wealthy tech investor. In November 2026, Huang was rumoured to have been having an affair with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (no relation). She was alleged by U.S. intelligence to be a spy for China recruited by the Ministry of State Security. Megaspeed is also alleged to have violated American export controls on China on advanced semiconductors. The Chinese government has denied these espionage allegations. Later reporting revealed that the U.S. Intelligence Community is unsure if Huang is a spy and that intelligence collected on her to date did not prove that she was.
Early life and education
Huang Le was born in a rural area of Hunan Province. She attended Jiangnan Middle School (Class 9305) in the Yuhu District of Xiangtan in 1993, making her birth year about 1977.
In the mid-2000s, Huang studied in Hong Kong and received a Master of Social Science in media management from Hong Kong Baptist University. According to a former classmate, she was "well-liked, easygoing and ambitious". Huang later obtained Hong Kong residency and a Hong Kong passport.
Career
According to her public resume and private equity database, Huang claimed to have accumulated four years of experience in the media industry and eight years in the financial securities industry. At some point, she also worked in the video game industry. Huang worked as a television journalist for Chinese state media channels China Central Television and Hunan TV. Some Western media outlets have been unable to confirm some of these details. Hunan TV later said that there was no record of Huang's employment, and there was no relevant information on the official websites of the two TV stations. Bai Jie, a former CCTV reporter with the online name "Yaba", wrote that Huang was indeed her former office colleague.
Finance
Huang went to work at HSBC Hong Kong as president of the private banking department. At a later point, she joined CITIC Securities as part of its credit trading division, where she was the vice president of the securities and financial business line of the financial market management committee. In 2015, Huang joined the private equity firm Hexi Capital, a company founded by Kang Wei in 2010, as an executive director and partner. This firm was involved with gaming, technology, and data centres. Huang also served as a director of Shanghai Yunxi Investment Management Consulting, one of the shareholders of Hexi Capital. Before Huang joined, Hexi Capital underwent a shareholding restructuring. After the adjustment, Kang Wei held 48.75% of the shares, Zhu Xiaoming held 26.25%, and Huang held 25%. All of her shares were transferred by Kang and held through Shanghai Yunxi Investment. From 2016, Huang and Kang started co-running Hexi Capital. Many sources at the time assumed that the two were married because she introduced him as her husband during several social functions. According to the The Wall Street Journal Huang and Kang are married. Financial Times also reported Kang was Huang's romantic partner and financier. According to WeChat posts from Hexi Capital's official account in 2016 and 2017, Huang was the company's deputy general manager, executive director and a member of its investment decision committee.
During her tenure, Huang gradually established close ties with companies and investors in Shanghai and Zhejiang. The related business network participated in the construction of a large data centre for Tencent in the suburbs of Shanghai, and also invested in a cybersecurity subsidiary of China Electronics Technology Group Corporation. The Journal reported in 2026 that "Over the past decade, Kang and Alice Huang hopscotched from one lucrative opportunity to the next—video game companies, pharmaceutical takeovers and cloud computing—each time weaving a web of related entities, transferring stakes among themselves and capitalizing on whatever connections were at hand". It is unknown if Alice Huang ever left Hexi Capital; a company representative told the Financial Times that she had left the company in 2017, but an investor told the newspaper that she was still presenting business cards from the company as recently as 2025. A holding company founded by Huang held 48% ownership over Hexi Capital until August 2025. Starting in 2018, Kang and Hexi Capital were fined multi-million dollar penalties by the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) for violating Chinese law. Kang and Hexi Capital contested CSRC's findings during official hearings but their arguments were rejected. Kang was fined again in 2025, with the two fines totaling ¥2.9 million renminbi (US$434,600).
In August 2019, Huang conducted transactions through several British Virgin Islands offshore companies, including a Hong Kong company where Kang served as a director. She made ¥1 billion renminbi (US$145 million) from the sale of the British Virgin Islands-based holding company Osmanthus Vale Holdings Limited, whose annual revenues had increased from US$36,000 in 2015 to US$36 million in 2018, to 7Road Holdings. Hexi was the "ultimate holding company" of Osmanthus, which was incorporated in the British Virgin Islands less than two months before the purchase by 7Road. Hangzhou Shengfeng was the biggest operating subsidiary of Osmanthus; the company was purchased from Zhejiang Century Huatong Group, a maker of internet video games which had invested along Hexi Capital, by a Hexi-backed fund in 2017 for ¥500 million renminbi. In 2019, the Hexi-backed fund moved Hangzhou Shengfeng to newly created offshore companies before consolidated them under Osmanthus. It is unclear how Huang came to own 100 percent of Osmanthus.
Technology
By 2020, Kang and Huang were joint business partners in many ventures. They were also moving towards cloud computing. That year, they helped build and operate an AI computing centre in Shanghai for Tencent. From 2021 to 2022, Huang served as the director of Shanghai Longjing Information Technology; the company was founded in December 2020 as a data-centre focused subsidiary of Zhejiang Century Huatong Group, which had also bought a 10 percent stake in 7Road in the same month. Shanghai Longjing's legal representative Gu Jiong had worked with Huang in Hexi Capital and was the legal representative of Hangzhou Shengfeng Network Technology, a Chinese video game company that Huang sold to 7Road in 2019. The Shanghai Municipal People's Government announced in 2023 that Shanghai Longjing would build a data centre called the Yangtze River Delta Project with 6,000 AI server racks, with the location being a complex which has Tencent as a major tenant; according to The Wire China, Tencent rents rack space from the company, which it uses to fill with own chips, with the Songjiang district government reporting the complex would eventually provide 10 times as much computing power as the world's largest supercomputer. A Tencent spokesperson subsequently said Tencent has never had a stake in the complex or operated it, while The Wire China said it is unknown if Huang held an operational role at Shanghai Longjing.
In November 2024, Huang was appointed as a director of the ride-hailing platform T3 Mobility (Nanjing Lingxing Technology). The platform was jointly invested by the three major state-owned automobile enterprises, together with Tencent and Alibaba Group, and submitted a listing application to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in April 2026. However, it was suspended by the China Securities Regulatory Commission in September 2026, and the authorities launched an investigation into the issue of shareholding on behalf of others. In addition, Huang also registered two new companies in Hong Kong in July and August 2026 (such as Stag Bay Technology Limited and Aspen Creek Limited), and continued to use secretarial companies and shell companies to carry out capital operations.
Megaspeed
In 2023, a few months after the United States government imposed export restrictions on artificial intelligence chips to China, Huang was a part of the group of investors who purchased 7Road International PTE, the Singapore subsidiary of the 7Road Holdings; the subsidiary was sold to a British Virgin Islands-registered company associated with Huang called Huang Le Ltd and renamed to Megaspeed. Huang became the controlling shareholder in March of that year. She served as the director of the company from March to November 2023. She also served as the director and managing director of the company's Indonesia subsidiary in the same period. Kang also worked with Huang in building the business. They presented themselves as AI entrepreneurs, courting investors and business partners in a private club located next to the Radisson Blu Hotel Shanghai New World; they did not disclose their romantic relationship to investors. Huang was described as having "formidable networking skills and a strong record of turning those relationships into business deals". In Singapore, she began to identify herself as Alice Wong, using the Cantonese spelling of her surname instead of Mandarin Chinese. Her sister Huang Yu was also named as director and investor in companies connected to Huang and Kang.
On paper, Huang left the company in November 2023 and sold Huang Le Ltd sold the shares of Megaspeed to a Singapore shell company owned by Tan Yong Pong called Swiftdata International. However, according to an investigation by Culper Research, Huang was still in charge of the company in May 2026. The Journal also reported that she continued to act as the company's leader since then, introducing herself as Megaspeed's CEO to a business partner as recently as August 2025. Huang continued to participate in the chip procurement and fundraising work of SwiftData as a senior manager until she left the company in 2025. SwiftData's actual office scale in Singapore was limited, with only one storefront office and only 2 to 10 employees listed on LinkedIn. Agence France-Presse reported that the contact number listed on the company's official website was actually a private residence.
One of Megaspeed's biggest clients became Alibaba Group, the online Chinese retailer. Megaspeed was Alibaba Group's anchor customer for cloud services in Southeast Asia since the beginning, and was its biggest client. The Wall Street Journal reported Alibaba Group was looking for a partner that would help it access data centres with chips from the American multinational technology corporation Nvidia. Huang was present at one of the first meetings between Nvidia and Megaspeed; Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was not present. She was described as "unassuming and quiet" in the meeting. Megaspeed told the Nvidia team about its relationship with Alibaba Group. Megaspeed later told Nvidia that Alibaba Group would be an anchor customer. Megaspeed became an "Nvidia cloud partner" in November 2023, giving the company priority access to chips. According to the Journal, Megaspeed also brought servers it acquired from Nvidia to data centres in Malaysia, which provided computing power to Alibaba, and shipped some of the servers to China, including the Shanghai-based Century Litong which Kang had done business with. In June 2024, Alibaba Group, through its Singaporean subsidiary called Apex Enterprise Solutions, lent money to Megaspeed, via its Malaysian subsidiary Speedmatrix, with Speedmatrix pledging its entire business as collateral for the loan. In 2024, Megaspeed's balance sheet increased from $33 million to $3 billion, mostly due to its subsidiaries’ dealings. In the summer of 2024, Megaspeed International entered into a joint partnership with Nvidia. Megaspeed was planning on purchasing $2 billion of Nvidia's stock. The Journal reported Kang and Huang also planned several data centre projects from late 2024 to June 2025, including two in Southeast Asia and one in Shanghai, with the couple expressing confidence expecting to triple their money in three years and get Nvidia chips to China. In early 2025, Huang and Kang sought investment worth several hundred million dollars for a Southeast Asia data centre project, and told investors they had "no problem securing GPUs" and cited Alibaba Group as a partner for the project.
In 2024, during the Biden Administration, the United States Department of Commerce was investigating whether Megaspeed was circumventing American export restrictions. Their suspicion held that Huang was flying to Taiwan, repackaging Nvidia chips, and smuggling them into China to be sold as Megaspeed products. In 2024, the Taiwanese government, at the request of the United States, began monitoring Huang's movements. In June 2025, the government of Singapore interrogated Huang under the suspicion that she was violating Singaporean customs law. They held her passport until February 2026, in an attempt to prevent her from leaving the country. However, those investigations were concluded without charges being brought; after consulting with the Attorney General's Chambers, the Singapore Police Force determined that the existing evidence was insufficient to prove that Huang had committed the relevant crimes, leading her to be released with a "stern warning". After the investigation, Huang left Singapore for Shanghai on 26 February and never returned. She was also barred from entering Singapore again for providing false information. She has not been seen in public since October 2025. In her absence, another CEO has been overseeing Megaspeed's operations. CNN reported that for at least several months by the spring 2026, Huang was an intelligence target for the National Security Agency. In 2026, Kang was arrested due to stock-market manipulation involving listed companies, but was subsequently released and was pictured at Stanford University. The Wall Street Journal reported Alice Huang was in China in September 2026. Financial Times also reported that people who knew her believed that she was back in China. Bloomberg News later reported that Huang had returned to China was currently living in Beijing.
Personal life
Huang is married to Chinese investor Kang Wei.
Relationship with Jensen Huang
Alice Huang met Jensen Huang (no relation), the CEO of Nvidia during an annual Nvidia event in California in early 2024, where she acted as Megaspeed's representative. The Wall Street Journal reported that Jensen Huang was introduced to Alice Huang by Kang Wei. Kang had met Jensen Huang in Asia in the 2010s through Hexi Capital's investment in tech businesses including video games, with Nvidia focusing on chips for video games at the time. The Journal also reported that Kang appeared to accept his wife's close relationship to Jensen Huang and spoke openly of their closeness. Alice Huang and Jensen Huang met later at Computex Taipei in June 2024, where they appeared at a party together along with senior executives from Gigabyte Technology. When Jensen Huang visited Taiwan in May 2025, Alice Huang was among a group of tech executives seen dining with Jensen Huang in a local restaurant.
In October 2025, The New York Times published a story with photographs of Huang meeting Jensen Huang. On 6 November 2026, The New York Times reported that according to people briefed on the intelligence, a memo had circulated among top U.S. officials that Alice Huang was a spy for China's Ministry of State Security. On 7 November 2026, the Financial Times reported that the U.S. Intelligence Community believed Alice Huang was recruited by the MSS. On 6 November 2026, Jensen Huang sent a corporate email addressed to "my colleagues at Nvidia", apologising for his infidelity without naming the other party. Media houses around the world speculated the possibility of the affair being a sexpionage operation plotted by Alice Huang. The Chinese government denied allegations that Huang Le was spying for the Chinese government, calling them "pure fabrication out of thin air". After a classified intelligence briefing on 11 November, Congressman Jim Himes, predicted to be the incoming chair of the United States House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, expressed doubts on whether Alice Huang was actually a Chinese spy. He stated that when he directly asked Jay Clayton and John Ratcliffe whether a counterintelligence investigation had commenced at the FBI, "they didn't know." According to the Financial Times on 10 November, a Megaspeed executive told them that MSS asked about Alice Huang earlier in 2026 after Singapore started investigating the company for violating customs law, with MSS wanting to find out information about her, including the nature of her business and connections.
On November 11, 2026, Liu Shih-fang, Minister of the Interior of Taiwan, and Lin Hong-en, the Director of the National Immigration Agency, stated during questioning at the Legislative Yuan, that the Taiwanese authorities had full control over Alice Huang's entry and exit information. On 12 November, the Ministry of the Interior of Taiwan revoked Alice Huang's business-purpose entry permit to Taiwan. Taiwanese officials also started investigating whether her trips included intelligence gathering or whether she violated the Anti-Infiltration Act. The same day, Singapore's Ministry of Home Affairs stated that it barred Alice Huang from entering the country after she gave "inaccurate information" to police. The ministry further stated that it previously confiscated her passport as part of an investigation into the smuggling of Nvidia chips into China but returned it in February 2026. On 13 November, CNN reported that according to sources, the US Intelligence Community was unsure if Alice Huang was a spy and intelligence collected to date did not prove that she was. It reported that some officials in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, including those close to director Jay Clayton, believed the characterization of Alice Huang being a spy as "not entirely accurate and over-torqued", while officials in the Central Intelligence Agency believed that the information collected to date, including intercepted communications, has not yet proved that Huang was knowingly giving information to China.
