And Every New Boy That You Meet / He Doesn’t Know the Real Surprise

Lingling Wei, reporting for The Wall Street Journal:

Before the affair that threatened his job as Nvidia’s chief executive, Jensen Huang was introduced to his future romantic interest, Alice Huang, by a Chinese businessman he’d known for a decade, Kang Wei.

Kang also happened to be Alice Huang’s husband, said people who know the couple.

For two years, Kang appeared to accept his wife’s romantic relationship with the Nvidia CEO and spoke openly of their closeness, these people said. Sometimes, Kang told associates, half-jokingly, that she was a personal assistant to Jensen Huang, they said.

The Cars’ “My Best Friend’s Girl” is not a bad song to have stuck in your head. Not a bad song at all.

Over the past decade, Kang and Alice Huang hopscotched from one lucrative opportunity to the next — videogame companies, pharmaceutical takeovers and cloud computing — each time weaving a web of related entities, transferring stakes among themselves and capitalizing on whatever connections were at hand, said people familiar with the couple’s business dealings. Nvidia’s AI chips were the latest play for a couple with a track record of riding hot trades and, on occasion, running afoul of regulators.

Now the couple are the subject of a raft of investigations, and the blast radius of their relations with Jensen Huang is expanding.

U.S. officials believe that China’s intelligence services recruited Alice Huang as an asset because of her access to the chip-designer chief.

That sentence at the end clarifies what I think is, at the moment, a widely held misconception. The allegation that Alice Huang was a “spy” for Chinese intelligence isn’t she was a trained secret agent whose mission was to seduce Jensen Huang and infiltrate Nvidia. It’s that once the Chinese spooks learned of the affair — which, in hindsight, wasn’t well hidden — they gave Alice Huang an offer she couldn’t refuse. To do what, we don’t know, but it sure sounds like a part of it was to procure and smuggle Nvidia hardware in contravention of U.S. national security regulations.

★ Thursday, 12 November 2026