A Bar Photo Fuels 'Spy' Buzz Online: Jensen Huang and Alice Huang Seen Together Twice in Taipei as Huang Calls the Dealings Normal
The same set of photos has been circulating across Chinese- and English-language social media for days: Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang seated beside a woman who shares his surname, drinks on the table, under captions about a 'beauty spy' who got close to him. The posts have spread widely on X, Weibo, YouTube and Chinese-language self-media accounts. The underlying report came from The New York Times on October 29: citing people briefed on classified intelligence, the paper said U.S. intelligence agencies had concluded that Alice Huang (Huang Le), a former executive at Singapore data-center company Megaspeed, gathered information for the Chinese government, and that she had built a 'close relationship' with Jensen Huang. The two are not related. As of publication, no public evidence supports the espionage allegation, Alice Huang has not been charged with any crime, and Jensen Huang has responded publicly, calling the dealings 'normal and not unusual.'
The most widely shared image is a June 2024 photo at a Taipei bar: Jensen Huang holds a glass of whiskey and Alice Huang sits beside him, with several other AI-industry executives at the table. The photo was not a paparazzi shot; it was first posted on LinkedIn by a company called Net Thunder, which identified her as 'Alice Wong, chairwoman of Megaspeed.' Taiwan's EBC News traced the location to the Opera Sky Bar on the 15th floor of the Illume Taipei hotel, at an after-party during the Computex trade show, with Gigabyte founder Y.P. Yeh and general manager E.T. Lee among those present.
The second much-shared set of images dates to May 2025, when Huang dined with executives from several AI suppliers at the San Liu restaurant in Taipei. In the circulating footage of the group leaving, Huang chats with Taiwanese reporters outside the restaurant while Alice Huang stands a few feet behind him, smiling and waiting.
Online commentators have read the two scenes — sitting side by side at the bar, her being the only woman seated in the group photo, waiting behind him after dinner — as signs of intimacy, spinning them into 'spy gets close' narratives and insinuations about a personal relationship. Those readings are speculation by onlookers. The Times itself wrote that it could not establish how close the relationship actually was, and its report did not address whether the relationship was romantic in nature.
Netizens also dug up her public résumé. A fund-manager profile on the Chinese private-fund database Simuwang lists Huang Le as an executive director of Shanghai Hexi Investment Management, saying she worked as a news reporter for Hunan TV and CCTV-1, then as assistant to the president of HSBC's private-banking division and a vice president at CITIC Securities. The New York Post checked and reported that an executive at Hunan TV said, 'I have not heard of her,' and that the Post found no reporting under her name on CCTV's website. As early as October 2025, a Beijing-critical Chinese-language YouTube channel had placed the fund-profile photo side by side with the photos of her next to Jensen Huang.
Both encounters that keep being reposted happened in public: one at a bar gathering full of industry peers during a trade show, in a photo the participating company itself posted on LinkedIn; the other at a business dinner attended by multiple supplier executives, with reporters waiting outside. That sits awkwardly with a narrative of secret contact. GSM presents both points without drawing a conclusion for the reader.
Jensen Huang defended the relationship in an interview with Bloomberg News on October 29, calling Nvidia's business with Megaspeed 'normal and not unusual,' and saying: 'We've studied all their deployments of our GPUs and counted every one.' According to Bloomberg and Taiwanese media accounts, he added that his interactions with Alice Huang were routine, the same as his dealings with Chinese customers and executives generally; that she has left Megaspeed; and that the U.S. government never told him of any suspicions about her. One clarification for readers: the widely repeated line that Huang 'said she is not a spy' appears in no wire or newspaper account as a verbatim quote; it is a paraphrase of the denials above. Nvidia spokesman John Rizzo separately said: 'Jensen's interactions with Ms. Huang are not unusual or unexpected.'
Other parties have also weighed in. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun said at an October 30 briefing that the reporting was groundless speculation and a smear against China; Chinese Embassy spokesman Liu Chang in Washington called it groundless slander. Megaspeed said it takes the matter extremely seriously, has hired outside lawyers to run an internal investigation and will cooperate with U.S. authorities. Singapore police told The Wall Street Journal that investigations into Megaspeed are ongoing; Singapore's Ministry of Home Affairs later said separately that there were no such investigations into Alice Huang over her alleged China ties — the two statements do not match. The White House, the CIA and the NSA declined to comment. Alice Huang did not respond to requests for comment.
The verification status of the story is as follows. The espionage allegation rests solely on unnamed intelligence officials cited by The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal; no evidence has been made public, and it remains undisclosed what information she is supposed to have passed. According to the Times, U.S. officials concluded that Jensen Huang did not know of her alleged activities, though the paper also reported that some senior Trump administration officials privately doubt that; it said President Trump was briefed about a year ago and took no action. On chip diversion, trade records show a Malaysian affiliate of Megaspeed bought at least $4.8 billion of equipment containing Nvidia technology between June 2024 and February 2026, and the Commerce Department probe has since been taken over by the Justice Department; Nvidia says the diversion allegations were thoroughly investigated and debunked last year.
Source: GSM · USA
Source: GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：英伟达创始人兼首席执行官黄仁勋2025年1月在拉斯维加斯消费电子展（CES）上发表英伟达主题演讲（Joseph Zadeh 摄，经 Wikimedia Commons，CC BY-SA 4.0）。 / Jensen Huang delivering the Nvidia keynote at CES in Las Vegas in January 2025 (Joseph Zadeh via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0).
