The report from CNBC raises a serious question that Nvidia and Jensen Huang should answer publicly: did a woman with a reported romantic relationship with the company's ousted CEO also hold stakes in businesses linked to Huawei at the same time she was in business with Nvidia? Nvidia and Huawei did not respond to CNBC's requests for comment, and Jensen Huang did not respond to a voicemail. Silence is not an answer.
The evidence so far comes from analysts at Tesari, a private intelligence firm, and from corporate records and media reports that Tesari compiled and CNBC translated. According to those documents, Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le, sold a cloud business called Osmanthus to 7Road in 2019, and a 7Road subsidiary was later spun off as Megaspeed, which The Information reported helped facilitate at least $7.5 billion in Nvidia chip shipments to Chinese firms. Separately, Huang's firm Shanghai Hexi held a stake in a company that controlled a Shenzhen data center whose key customer was Huawei Cloud. The report says the Shenzhen data center's majority owner began buying Nvidia GPUs in 2023, though it is unclear whether the data center actually acquired them.
Those are the facts the report can support. What it cannot establish is intent. Tesari says it suspects the structure was designed to obscure the relationship, and Brian Andersen's remarks about possible export-control, conspiracy and smuggling charges are conditional on the Commerce Department and Homeland Security Investigations finding evidence of unauthorized transfers. No such finding is reported here. Alice Huang could not be reached, and Hexi did not immediately respond. Readers should treat the allegations as allegations.
Still, the questions are pointed. Why would Huawei, which has access to Chinese-made chips, need to rent computing power from an outside entity? And did Jensen Huang know that his partner was connected to his company's biggest competitor in China? The report notes that the precise timing of the affair is unknown, which makes the second question harder to dismiss.
What should happen next is straightforward. Regulators with authority over export controls should examine the Megaspeed shipments and the Shenzhen arrangement, and Nvidia should disclose what it knew about its customers' ownership and end users. Investors deserve that disclosure now, before any investigation concludes.