Alice Huang: The Spy Narrative Misses Her Real Business

Desmond Shum

Nov 10, 2026

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Over the past few days, X has been flooded with stories about Alice Huang, the Chinese businesswoman at the center of the scandal involving Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

Almost everyone seems convinced that she is a Chinese spy who used a romantic relationship to compromise one of America’s most powerful technology executives.

American intelligence officials reportedly suspect that Huang was recruited by China’s Ministry of State Security. Yet the underlying evidence has not been made public, and no espionage case against her has been established in court.

On social media, however, suspicion has quickly become accepted fact. The spy narrative seems particularly appealing to China hawks, Democrats, AI skeptics, Trump critics, and others with reasons to question Jensen Huang’s conduct or influence.

Having spent more than two decades doing business in China, including years operating at the intersection of private enterprise, finance, and Communist Party politics, I see another possibility.

I suspect Alice Huang is primarily a commercial fixer, known in Chinese as a qian ke (掮客), who may also have served as a bai shou tao (白手套), literally a “white glove,” for other business interests, rather than a CCP intelligence operative.

What makes me think so is the career path she has traveled.

Recent Chinese-language investigations, drawing on corporate records, court judgments, regulatory penalties, and stock exchange disclosures, reveal Huang’s involvement in a series of complicated capital-market transactions.

The recurring pattern was the use of intermediaries and layered ownership structures that could separate the people appearing on transaction documents from those with the underlying economic interests.

When Huang subsequently emerged as the public face of Megaspeed, a little-known Singapore company purchasing billions of dollars’ worth of Nvidia chips, she was just repeating the same business model she has perfected.

The Chinese Art of Being a Fixer and a White Glove

A commercial fixer connects people with money to those who control resources, arranges financing, and helps transactions overcome commercial or political obstacles. Their most valuable asset is access.

A white glove performs a more specific function: acting on behalf of others while concealing the identities or interests of the real principals behind a transaction.

This is particularly useful in mergers and acquisitions, where related-party transactions can trigger disclosure requirements, shareholder approvals, and regulatory scrutiny. By inserting an apparently independent intermediary, connected parties can make a transaction appear to be conducted at arm’s length. Similar arrangements can also be used to circumvent sanctions or export restrictions.

During my decades in China and Hong Kong, I encountered many such intermediaries. Some were sophisticated financiers; others knew little about the businesses they represented. Their expertise lay in arranging financing, structuring ownership, and moving assets between companies while keeping the real beneficiaries out of public view.

Others simply served as frontmen—or, in this case a frontwoman.

The successful ones could move effortlessly between industries because their business was not operating companies. It was arranging transactions and shielding the interests behind them.

Shanghai: A Career Built Around Corporate Control

Alice Huang’s documented career in China’s capital markets began with Shanghai Hexi Investment Management (上海和熙投资), founded by Kang Wei (康伟), a former prominent securities analyst specializing in leveraged acquisitions and corporate control transactions.

Huang joined Hexi as a senior executive in 2015. She subsequently became a major shareholder through Shanghai Yunxi (上海韵禧), which reportedly held 48% of Hexi, with Kang holding the remaining 52%. Court documents indicate that Kang arranged substantial equity transfers into Huang’s name. Multiple Chinese media reports have described the two subsequently became husband and wife.

Why did Kang arrange for Huang to hold such a substantial stake? The significance becomes clearer when examining their investment network.

Hexi helped Phicomm (斐讯) founder Gu Guoping (顾国平) acquire control of listed Huiqiu Technology (慧球科技) through leveraged financing and multiple investment vehicles. By spreading share purchases across different accounts and funds, the parties obscured their coordinated acquisition of control, avoiding ownership disclosures that would otherwise have alerted regulators and minority shareholders.

Chinese securities regulators subsequently penalized Hexi and Kang for disclosure violations.

This illustrates how a white-glove structure can work in China’s capital markets: the real buyer accumulates control through ostensibly separate investment vehicles without revealing the full extent of his interests.

When Gu later encountered financial difficulties, Hexi-associated companies acquired substantial interests in Phicomm itself. Gu was subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment following Phicomm’s massive illegal fundraising scandal.

The more revealing example of Huang’s own role came in subsequent gaming-company transactions.

In 2019, Hong Kong-listed 7Road agreed to acquire gaming company Osmanthus for RMB 1 billion (US$140 million). The seller was Maple Vale Limited, a British Virgin Islands company wholly owned by Huang.

But Huang was not an unrelated investor who had independently built the gaming business. The assets had previously been held through Hexi-associated investment vehicles, including Feiye Investment. Kang Wei also appeared as a director of Hawthorn Vale Holdings (Hong Kong), a company within the ownership chain.

Yet 7Road’s transaction disclosures reportedly described Huang as an independent third party.

This is where her potential white-glove role becomes concrete. Rather than Hexi-connected interests appearing directly as the seller, Huang’s offshore company stood between those interests and the listed-company buyer.

Such an arrangement could make a transaction involving connected interests appear independent, potentially avoiding the additional scrutiny associated with related-party transactions.

Was Huang genuinely buying and selling these assets for her own benefit? Or was she holding and transferring them on behalf of Kang and other principals?

The corporate relationships do not conclusively answer that question. But they explain why her role matters: she provided the legal identity through which a RMB 1 billion transaction was conducted, while the connections to her Shanghai investment network were less immediately visible.

And the relationship with 7Road would lead directly to her next venture.

From Gaming to AI: A Familiar Network Enters a New Industry

Chinese financial reporting has uncovered another important connection.

The broader Hexi investment network had already expanded into data centers and cloud infrastructure, including transactions involving Century Huatong (世纪华通) and related computing businesses.

Huang’s personal involvement in those later investments has not been established. But the network in which she developed her career was already moving toward computing infrastructure.

In 2023, Huang acquired control of 7Road International, a Singapore company previously associated with the Hong Kong-listed gaming group.

She renamed it Megaspeed International and shifted its business toward AI cloud computing.

Within months, Megaspeed became an official Nvidia cloud partner. Over the following two years, it reportedly acquired approximately US$4.8 billion worth of Nvidia equipment.

A woman whose documented career centered on corporate restructuring, leveraged acquisitions, and offshore holding companies suddenly emerged as the public face of a multibillion-dollar AI infrastructure business.

There is little publicly documented evidence that she had previously operated major data centers or developed advanced computing technology.

But perhaps that was never her contribution.

What if Megaspeed was simply a much larger version of the intermediary arrangements she had worked with in China’s capital markets?

The company’s finances make that possibility particularly interesting.

Megaspeed reportedly had only millions of dollars in initial financial resources when it began arranging billions of dollars in Nvidia purchases. Its total assets stood at approximately US$33 million at the end of 2023, according to corporate filings reviewed by Reuters.

By the end of 2024, its assets had expanded to approximately US$3 billion.

There was also a change in ownership. In late 2023, Megaspeed’s shares were transferred to a newly incorporated Singapore company, SwiftData. Huang ceased holding certain formal corporate positions but continued to be publicly associated with Megaspeed’s leadership.

The company’s ultimate beneficial ownership remains unclear.

The combination of a modest initial financial base, enormous purchases, and changes in registered ownership raises a familiar question: who was actually behind the business?

Alibaba: Who Was Really Buying the Chips?

A May 2026 investigation by short-selling firm Culper Research identified substantial financing arrangements involving an Alibaba-related company.

According to the report, Megaspeed’s financial statements showed approximately US$2.9 billion in refundable deposits at the end of 2024.

Culper also identified Apex Enterprise Solutions, a Singapore company reportedly controlled by Alibaba, as a major financing counterparty.

Corporate records cited in the investigation reportedly show that Megaspeed’s Malaysian subsidiary, Speedmatrix, pledged its existing and future equipment to Apex. The report further alleged that Apex had provided approximately US$4.1 billion in prepayments by March 2025.

More recent reporting has also identified Alibaba as a major customer and financing counterparty, rather than merely a name appearing in a short seller’s allegations.

If Alibaba-related entities supplied much of the financing and were major customers for the computing capacity, Megaspeed’s apparent role as the purchaser may not tell the whole story.

Alibaba may have been the ultimate economic buyer of substantial computing capacity, while Megaspeed served as the intermediary purchasing and deploying the equipment.

Was Megaspeed an independent commercial principal, or was it providing a layer of separation between Nvidia and the Chinese interests financing and benefiting from the purchases?

The parallel with Huang’s earlier transactions is striking.

In an M&A transaction, an intermediary can create distance between related buyers and sellers. In the AI chip business, an intermediary can create distance between a Chinese end customer and an American technology supplier.

The legal and commercial circumstances differ, but the principle is the same: the party appearing on the contract may not be the party providing the money or ultimately benefiting from the transaction.

GDS and Chindata: Who Actually Operates the Data Centers?

Another intriguing clue has emerged from Megaspeed’s website.

Researchers examining its HTML source code have reported finding references to two major Chinese data center operators:

Wanguo corresponds to GDS Holdings (万国数据), while Qinhuai refers to Chindata (秦淮数据).

Both are major data center operators with Chinese roots and infrastructure interests in Malaysia.

Yet Megaspeed’s public website identifies the facilities only as DC1 and DC2, with their locations described vaguely as “East South Asia.”

Researchers also report that the image used for DC1 closely resembles a publicly available rendering of a GDS data center development in Johor, Malaysia.

These clues do not establish that either company operated facilities used by Megaspeed. But I have another piece of information that makes the GDS connection