Alice Huang-Founded Chinese Company Acquired Banned Nvidia Chips: Report

A Chinese company founded by Alice Huang, the alleged spy for Beijing at the centre of the scandal surrounding Nvidia, obtained banned AI chips, Bloomberg News reported on Friday.

Nvidia's former CEO Jensen Huang resigned on Thursday after admitting to having extramarital affairs, including one reportedly with Alice Huang. China denies that she is a spy.

The scandal has raised concerns that high-end Nvidia microchips might have found their way to China, the United States' main AI rival, in circumvention of Washington's export restrictions.

Alice Huang is mainly known as a former top executive at Megaspeed International, a Singapore-based data center company that has drawn scrutiny over allegedly steering Nvidia chips to China.

However, she also founded Shanghai Longteng Intelligent Computing, a company based in the eastern Chinese economic hub.

Bloomberg reported, citing an unnamed source, that Aperia Cloud Services, an official Nvidia partner headquartered in Singapore, purchased servers containing Nvidia's H800 chips from Dell Technologies.

Those servers later ended up in the hands of Shanghai Longteng, the financial news outlet said, citing documents submitted to the Chinese government.

It was not clear how the hardware was obtained or whether Alice Huang was involved in the deal, according to Bloomberg.

The United States banned the export of H800 chips to China in 2023, part of an effort to slow the development of AI technology by Beijing.

Megaspeed said on Thursday it was investigating whether it had complied with export controls on sensitive microchips. Malaysia has said it is probing a Megaspeed subsidiary over the possible diversion of advanced AI chips to other countries.