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By Didi Kirsten Tatlow
Senior Correspondent, International Affairs
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Who is Alice Huang? Amid a global media storm, silence has surrounded the alleged Chinese spy thought to have had an affair with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. Her image—a slim, vivacious woman in a pink sleeveless dress—has gone around the world.
Newsweek could not reach Ms. Huang through her WeChat account or through Megaspeed, the Singapore-based company she once ran. A phone call and an email to the company went unanswered. Her whereabouts is unknown. Even online sleuths in China, who excel at what they call "human flesh searches," are complaining.
"Strange, to my surprise, I can’t find any information about Huang Le," said an account in Shandong province, Agua Doesn’t Talk Nonsense, using her Chinese name.
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U.S. intelligence officials have concluded that Ms. Huang was an asset of China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS). That means an MSS asset may have been just one or two steps away from President Donald Trump himself, since the Nvidia boss and the president are friendly and have often met to discuss the strategic issue of semiconductors, which are essential for AI and data centers.
Either way, highly sensitive chip export controls from America to China have been weakened, with the Department of Commerce under Howard Lutnick—inexplicably to many U.S. national security and technology experts—relaxing bans during the last year. Nvidia is a pivotal company for the U.S., and its CEO has pushed policymakers not to crimp exports to China in particular, to the extent of losing a lot of friends in D.C.
It seems the MSS has pulled off a massive intelligence coup. In the U.S. it will long reverberate, with a first congressional hearing set up for November 18, the day after Nvidia reports its annual earnings. Questions will be fast and furious: how much did Mr. Huang know? How badly has the U.S. been compromised in one of its key assets in geopolitical competition with its key adversary, China?
Jensen Huang, who is not related to Ms. Huang, has admitted to an affair, although she was not named. Nvidia says no secrets were compromised and Beijing calls the allegations smears.
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What remains unexplained is the word "asset." In the MSS’s world, this can describe an intelligence officer working under business cover, a willing recruit taking orders, or someone drawn in after a relationship has already begun. Which of those Ms. Huang may have been determines who directed her, from when, and what she was in a position to learn.
The service behind her
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) intelligence lineage predates the People’s Republic. Espionage of all kinds, from small acts to large gains, from grassroots to leadership circles, was vital to overthrowing the ruling Nationalists and seizing power in a revolution in 1949.
"The MSS comes out of a tradition that prizes getting inside an adversary’s decision-making, a skill the party relied on during its rise to power," Mattis said.
Its intelligence lineage runs from the Central Special Branch of the late 1920s through the Social Affairs Department of the Yan’an years of the 1940s to the Central Investigation Department, founded in 1955. In July 1983, under former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, that department was merged with the counterintelligence units of the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) to form the MSS. The MPS also conducts extensive espionage operations including against dissidents at home and around the world. China also has a large military intelligence apparatus, and many dedicated cyberespionage units including ones outside government that serve it.
But the MSS is a key player. U.S. prosecutors describe it as a central ministry with provincial departments and municipal bureaus beneath it, each able to run its own operations abroad. Since late 2022 the ministry has been led by Chen Yixin, a longtime aide to Chinese President Xi Jinping from his years in Zhejiang province.
And In 2024 Xi called high technology, which includes Nvidia’s best chips and the AI they power, "the forefront and main battlefield" of geostrategic competition. Xi has since placed Chen at the front of China’s AI strategy, as Newsweek reported.
The global strategic competition over AI and other critical technologies is seen in Beijing as so vital that it has been elevated to a core MSS mission—alongside other core "struggles," which are ideological in nature, for example, against subversion and secession, as well as terrorism.
If Ms. Huang is an MSS operative, which has not been confirmed, Chen is her ultimate boss.
What kind of asset might she have been to him?
Peter Mattis, president of The Jamestown Foundation, began his career as a CIA counterintelligence analyst and co-wrote Chinese Communist Espionage: An Intelligence Primer, a reference guide to the MSS and its forerunners. He told Newsweek there were three possibilities.
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Possibility One: The Officer
"The first is that Huang Le is an MSS officer. I think this is the most unlikely," Mattis told Newsweek. "In this case, she probably would have been placed with MegaSpeed because the MSS was using the company operationally. And then they saw an opportunity to take advantage of Jensen Huang."
Megaspeed’s history is unusual. The company was set up in Singapore in March 2023 as a subsidiary of 7Road, a Chinese video game company, then sold to an entity called Huang Le Limited. In November 2023 it was sold again to a Singaporean company owned by Tan Yong Pong, who became chief executive. The company went on to buy at least $4.8 billion of Nvidia equipment and U.S. investigators found that it built data centers across Southeast Asia and rented their computing power to Alibaba. Singapore police are investigating the company but no evidence of illicit chip transfers has been found.
Ms. Huang reportedly spent about four years as a journalist at the state broadcasters Hunan TV and CCTV, did a master’s degree in media management at Hong Kong Baptist University, and became a fund manager at Shanghai Hexi Investment Management around 2016 before taking charge of Megaspeed in 2023. Reporting from Hong Kong, The Information, a tech-specialist media, said that she has known Jensen Huang since "at least 2023," and that he had met her husband, Kang Wei, first, through the video gaming industry. It noted that she had no background in the semiconductor business.
An MSS officer’s work undercover has been laid out in a U.S. courtroom. Xu Yanjun joined the MSS in 2003 and rose to deputy division director. Posing as a representative of Chinese universities, he invited engineers from GE Aviation and other firms to give talks in China and paid their travel and stipends. According to the Justice Department, his colleagues copied the visitors’ computers in hotel rooms while the guests were taken out to dinner. In 2018 a GE employee cooperating with the FBI lured Xu to Belgium, where he was arrested. He became the first Chinese intelligence officer extradited to the U.S. for trial and was sentenced to 20 years in 2022.
Possibility Two: The Recruit
"The second is that Huang Le was a co-optee or recruited asset of the Ministry of State Security. This means that she was a willing collaborator with the MSS, taking direction, and acting on their orders. In this case, the MSS might have directed her toward Jensen Huang or she saw the operational value herself," Mattis said.
Federal prosecutors define assets as people who agree to give information to a foreign service in response to directions from its officers. Xu ran one: Ji Chaoqun, a Chinese student in Chicago who enlisted in the U.S. Army Reserve and was convicted in 2022 of working for the MSS under Xu’s direction.
The closest public parallel to the Huang case may be Christine Fang, also known as Fang Fang. According to a 2020 Axios investigation, she enrolled at California State University, East Bay in 2011 and spent four years cultivating rising politicians, including through campaign fundraising. Axios reported she had romantic or sexual relationships with at least two Midwestern mayors as well as former U.S. Representative Eric Swalwell. Counterintelligence officials believed she was acting at the direction of the MSS. She left the country abruptly in mid-2015 and was never charged.
One account of what a recruit in Ms. Huang’s position might have been told to do comes from Taiwan’s Liberty Times, which is close to Taiwan's government. Citing U.S. intelligence sources, it reported that she was "operating under the direct command of Chen Yixin." Newsweek cannot independently confirm the report, and Mattis said it would require careful confirmation. According to the paper, the CCP Central Committee has set up an "Artificial Intelligence Task Force" in which the MSS takes part, and the ministry has created an internal "Chip Division" to which Ms. Huang belonged. It said her tasks were twofold:
- "Insiders state that Huang Le’s primary objective was to establish shell companies in third-party countries to procure chips and high-end servers."
- "Furthermore, she sought to cultivate a relationship with Jensen Huang, with a clear goal: to persuade the Nvidia CEO to lobby Washington on behalf of Beijing for the easing of chip export controls—a move that would also, incidentally, allow Nvidia to secure greater profits."
The paper added that "other such operatives have already embedded themselves at various levels within major American technology companies."
Possibility Three: The Lover, Recruited Later
"The third is that Huang Le genuinely had some affection for Jensen Huang, began a relationship, and then the MSS recruited her to exploit her connection," Mattis said. "Their intimacy, trust, and shared business interests would offer many opportunities for Huang Le to ask questions and learn about Jensen Huang’s interactions with the White House and the president, which could provide valuable insights into presidential thinking."
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Mattis has described the lever before. When the U.S. banned its personnel in China from dating Chinese citizens in 2025, he said that state security gathers information not only through spies but by pressing ordinary Chinese people, often through threats or intimidation. A partner with family and business in China is exposed to exactly that pressure. By Chinese law, all citizens must "support, assist and cooperate" with the MSS, offering little choice.
The best-known case of a love affair turned to intelligence use predates the MSS itself. In 1964 Bernard Boursicot, a 20-year-old accountant at France’s new embassy in Beijing, met Shi Pei Pu, an opera singer, at a Christmas party. Their relationship lasted two decades. Boursicot was pressured into handing over documents from the embassy between 1969 and 1972, and later from his posting in Mongolia. Shi, a man, had convinced Boursicot that he was a woman. French prosecutors revealed otherwise after both were arrested in Paris in 1983. They were convicted of espionage in 1986, pardoned in 1987, and their story became the Broadway play M. Butterfly.
What the MSS would want from Jensen Huang
In all three cases the target is the same. Huang runs a company central to an industry the CCP has identified as key to scientific and technological power, and he placed himself close to President Trump and the White House. He spent much of 2025 lobbying for chip sales to China, and in December 2025 Trump cleared Nvidia’s H200 for approved Chinese customers.
That access made him useful both as a source of intelligence and, more importantly, to influence U.S. decision-making. In Mattis' view intelligence is mostly about supporting decisions, not collecting classified documents, so Huang’s conversations with the president would count as valuable political intelligence, something the Nvidia CEO may not have realized. Mattis added that the best agents of influence are often unaware they are carrying a message. If the MSS was shaping what Huang saw of China through Ms. Huang, he would never know how he was being used.
Blue, Gold, Yellow
"The MSS keeps files on key elites in every society," said Anne-Marie Brady, a professor of Chinese politics at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand who studies the CCP’s influence operations and espionage. That includes business figures as well as political leaders.
Brady pointed to an account of the ministry’s methods given by Guo Wengui, the exiled tycoon also known as Miles Guo. Guo was once close to Ma Jian, a former MSS vice minister later jailed for corruption, and has said he used his business empire on behalf of the MSS without holding a formal role in it. In 2017, after fleeing to New York, he described a three-pronged campaign he called "Blue-Gold-Yellow." In June 2026 a Manhattan federal judge sentenced Guo to 30 years for defrauding his own followers.
"Essentially, there are three types of elite entrapment: Blue, gold, yellow (lan, jin, huang 蓝金黄)," Brady told Newsweek. Blue refers to cyberattacks and phone-tapping, gold to bribery and corruption, and yellow, the color associated with pornography in Chinese, to sexual entrapment.
The MSS warns its own citizens about the yellow method. Since opening a WeChat account in July 2023 under Chen, the ministry has published comics based on real spy cases and offered rewards for tips. One post, the Soufan Center noted, cautioned Chinese readers against being ensnared by "exotic beauties."
Washington takes it seriously too. In January 2025 the outgoing U.S. ambassador, Nicholas Burns, barred American government personnel in China, along with their families and contractors holding security clearances, from romantic or sexual relationships with Chinese citizens. The State Department imposed the ban, Brady said, "because they believe the risk of this type of entrapment is so high." In October 2025 the department fired a diplomat who admitted concealing a relationship with a Chinese national it said had known ties to the CCP.
"In China, just as in the Soviet Union, some hotels have hidden cameras and listening devices, set up to record sexual traps, which is then used against the victim for blackmail," Brady said.
"Political and business elites need to understand that they are at high risk of being targeted for such espionage operations disguised as personal relationships or brief hookups."
Jürgen Kremb, a Taiwan-based espionage analyst, said the MSS is "a KGB on steroids." He cautioned: "For companies, this means counterintelligence can no longer be limited to government officials. It must also protect key people in technology firms."
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