Tesari tells CNBC that Alice Huang had stakes tied to Huawei

Tesari, a private intelligence firm, told CNBC that Alice Huang, an alleged Chinese spy, possibly owned stakes in businesses that supplied computing power to Huawei. Huawei is the biggest China competitor of Nvidia. Tesari tells that this happened around December 2023, when she and Nvidia chief Jensen Huang were first seen in public together. Nvidia, Huawei and Alice Huang gave no comment.

How it works

Tesari tells that Alice Huang co-owned a finance firm, Hexi. In 2021 Hexi bought 27 percent of a data center developer. That developer controlled a Shenzhen data center, and a customer of that center was Huawei Cloud. Hexi also guaranteed the loans for it.

The numbers

The Information reported that Megaspeed, a customer of Nvidia that is connected to her, helped ship $7.5 billion or more of chips to Chinese firms. The source does not show that the Shenzhen data center got Nvidia chips. Tesari did not publish its documents.

What is not known

Tesari suspects that the structure was made to hide the connection. It tells that the work needs a US national security investigation. No agency has said it will start one. Jensen Huang has admitted an affair, but the date is not known.

Insight: One web touches Nvidia and its rival

The New York Times tells that China recruited Alice Huang to spy on Nvidia. It tells that she is an executive of Megaspeed. This new report puts her network adjacent to Huawei too. This reads as a weak point in customer checks: a buyer of top chips can be in the same web as a rival. Chip makers must possibly map owners, not only buyers.