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By Didi Kirsten Tatlow and John Feng
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China Decoded is Newsweek’s in-depth newsletter about China’s growing influence on the world, written by Senior Correspondent for International Affairs and Investigations Didi Kirsten Tatlow and China Editor John Feng. It goes beyond the headlines to examine how Beijing thinks, how its policies travel beyond China’s borders, and what they mean for the United States and its allies. Readers can sign up for China Decoded to receive each edition directly in their inbox.
Here, for Newsweek Members, is the latest edition of China Decoded in full:
Much Ado About AI
The spy scandal that is roiling the U.S., China and Taiwan—did Jensen Huang, the CEO of a pivotal U.S. semiconductor company Nvidia, have an affair with a Chinese woman, Alice Huang (note: he’s only admitted he had an affair, not with whom) and was she an agent of some description for China’s Ministry of State Security—will run for a long time.
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In our story today we looked at what exactly Ms. Huang might be, apart from a businesswoman. It’s unclear. If there’s one thing intelligence analysts hate, it’s rumor presented as fact. That’s only sensible, and we, too, are keeping an open mind.
But are we sure that knowledge about the “special” ties between Mr. Huang and Ms. Huang had been talked and published about in the U.S. for a year or so, in the mainstream media, Chinese-language social media, and in investment reports by people who said they were shorting Nvidia due to its risky China policies. Those are an almost indecent eagerness to export national security-sensitive chips to China amid strained relations.
And yet the story is only now breaking in its full, gory, glory.
Photographs of the alleged affair partner and possible MSS agent or asset in a pink sleeveless dress, sometimes holding a red wine glass, sometimes touching an apparently keen Mr. Huang, are whizzing around the world. People in China are even rushing to buy that pink dress. Why now?
Black T-shirted Jensen Huang with his back to the camera and Alice Huang (no relation):
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Might there be a lot more to the story, some very experienced technology and intelligence analysts are asking? Perhaps it’s not as “simple” as it’s being presented (important chips, troubling reach into the U.S. president’s innermost circle, etc.)
We need to know more about the timeline—what the CIA and other intelligence community members knew, who knew it and when.
What about that IC report that went to President Donald Trump (he does not seem to have acted on it)? The IC is politicized after two years of a deeply divisive presidency that has seen many changes and much fury inside the agencies.
Why, in fact, did attention only take off after the midterm elections? Those earned Trump a severe drubbing and delivered both houses of Congress to the Democrats.
My favorite question is what, if any, has been the role of Marco Rubio, the secretary of state who is also Trump’s national security chief?
I heard that a couple months ago Rubio said essentially, “Wait a minute, what the hell’s going on here?” and authored a memo about the possible chips-spy situation, concerned about the risks. But what did he want done?
As one person put it to me—the gaps between the CIA’s discovery of Huang’s affair (last year at the latest), Rubio's intervention (about two months ago), and this story finally taking off are too long. Things may go deeper.
But what? And who exactly? Is it more a U.S. or a China issue? Is it about strategic AI competition more broadly? Is the MSS, and China, even more in the weeds than it seems to be, for example in multiple areas within the U.S. including data centers?
It could be about the direction of AI more generally. There is a truly epochal fight going on about how much and how fast to adopt it, how to regulate it, and, of course, the sprouting data centers that quite a lot of voters are upset about that Trump and his tech bros love but that were likely negative for the Republicans in the elections.
An Amazon data center under construction in New Florence, Mo., November 2026:
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A lot of people favor greater AI regulation and reaching agreements with China on the limits of use. Understandably. They’re concerned about the fate of the world.
The trouble with the crimp AI arguments is that China has made clear that it won’t be crimping its own AI as long as it serves the goals of the Communist Party, as we’ve reported in this newsletter before.
So, is more competition and a defensive posture, not agreements that may fail, ultimately the better answer? Tech stacks cordoned off from each other? How does that fit in with Nvidia’s stance on exporting chips to China? Where does Taiwan, where so many of the chips are made but which China is militarily threatening, come in?
There have been allegations that outside powers such as China and Russia may be involved in amplifying opposition on social media to data centers, via the usual tricks such as influencers, botnets, and in general all the cognitive warfare that we are slowly having to get used to but which we are very bad at defending against. Data centers present legitimate concerns such as land, water and power use. There’s the “ugly” factor.
But more broadly the growing concern is this: that things aren’t clear.
Here I’ll give the final word to experts. In a post today titled, “Espionage, AI and the Risks of Strategic Overreaction,” William Hannas and Huey Meei-Chang at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology in Washington, D.C. lay it out:
“Allegations involving Nvidia’s chief executive have renewed scrutiny of Chinese intelligence collection and U.S. controls on advanced AI chips. Meanwhile, local resistance to data centers—a sentiment that’s been linked to PRC influence campaigns—raises a different challenge to the infrastructure supporting American AI leadership. Although these episodes are not evidence of a coordinated Chinese campaign, together they illustrate how external security threats and domestic policy choices can shape the U.S.–China AI competition—and why responses must be grounded in evidence.”
Didi Kirsten Tatlow is Senior Correspondent, International Affairs/Investigations at Newsweek. She is based in Berlin, Germany. You can get in touch by email here.
The Data Story
Alice Huang is the woman at the center of the sex and espionage scandal involving Jensen Huang, the billionaire chief executive of America’s most valuable company, Nvidia.
But who was Ms. Huang, really? How much of her identity is relevant, how much is real, and how much is just a cover for her commercial activities?
Those are the questions we have been asking this week. And while we cannot say for certain how much of the person Mr. Huang knew was genuine, we can say what the records show.
Ms. Huang, whose Chinese name is Huang Le, is said to have received a master’s degree in media communications from Hong Kong Baptist University sometime in the mid-2000s.
She spent four years at Hunan TV and at China’s state broadcaster CCTV before moving into finance, according to a profile on the private fund database Simuwang and a biography published by a former employer.
From 2008-2012, Ms. Huang worked in private banking at HSBC in Hong Kong and was a vice president at the Citic Securities investment bank from 2013-2015.
In November that year, she joined Shanghai Hexi Investment, a private equity firm, as its executive director, a company bio said in 2016.
Hexi was founded years earlier by fund manager Kang Wei. Kang and Ms. Huang presented themselves husband and wife, although the year of their marriage and their current marital status were unclear, the Chinese financial magazine Caixin reported this week.
Newsweek couldn’t independently verify the Simuwang profile or the Hexi bio. There was no public record of Ms. Huang’s media career, although one former news anchor in Beijing claimed to know her.
Bai Jie, who has over 2 million followers on the social media app Weibo, said in a now-removed post that she and Ms. Huang had worked together at CCTV.
“I could see then that she was exceptional, but I didn't expect her to be this exceptional,” Bai wrote.
The Weibo post was later removed, and Bai told her followers she didn’t delete it. A tag on her profile said later that her account had been banned from posting “due to violations of relevant laws and regulations.”
Back to Ms. Huang ... Things become a little clearer after she joins Hexi, where she also worked as a fund manager. She was last seen in a company social media post in May 2018, when she and her husband appeared at the unveiling of an Alibaba-linked project.
There’s a gap in the timeline before she bought Megaspeed in 2023, but corporate records show the cloud computing company was once the Singapore arm of the Chinese game developer 7Road before a name change after the acquisition that March.
She held the company for just eight months before transferring ownership to Swiftdata, a Singapore-based holding company.
Megaspeed quickly became Nvidia’s largest customer in Southeast Asia, purchasing $4.6 billion worth of advanced processors from 2023-2025 as part of a suspected transshipment scheme to blacklisted end users in China, according to a September report by the Center for Advanced Defense Studies, a Washington think tank.
Ms. Huang continued to present herself as chief executive officer of Megaspeed, including on her LinkedIn profile.
She had no background in the semiconductor business but appeared to be a successful broker. It’s unclear when she first met Nvidia boss Mr. Huang, but her husband, Kang, may have played a role thanks to past investments in the video game industry, according to The Information, a tech-specialist website.
Nvidia was a household name in computer graphics chips long before leading the AI boom became its main business.
The two Huangs were photographed together at social gatherings in Taipei in 2024 and 2025.
Immigration authorities in Taiwan confirmed that Ms. Huang had traveled to the island on a Hong Kong passport, which typically comes with less scrutiny than a mainland Chinese document.
Liu Shyh-fang, Taiwan’s interior minister, told Taiwanese lawmakers on Wednesday that Ms. Huang’s entry rights had been revoked indefinitely.
Spy or not, the obvious question at the end of all this is how much Nvidia knew about Ms. Huang’s role. If she acted as a dealer for commercial interests in China to hide their sensitive tracks, then the very same intermediary role she played benefited Nvidia’s chip business too and offered the U.S. tech giant a degree of deniability.
We’ve looked this week at the different roles a person like Ms. Huang might play for an intelligence agency, all the way from formal spy (unlikely) to co-opted asset.
Hong Kong businessman Desmond Shum, an astute observer of Chinese money and politics, made the point on his Substack blog on Tuesday that Ms. Huang may have been a “white glove,” a kind of commercial fixer and intermediary.
We’ll know more when, or rather if, Mr. Huang appears to testify before Congress later this month.
John Feng is Newsweek's China Editor based in Taichung, Taiwan. You can get in touch with John by email here.
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