Whether she was a spy, a fixer, or just a paramour of Jensen Huang, the name Alice Huang (no relation) has roiled the business world this week following reports that the two were having an affair. The revelation snowballed into Jensen’s shocking resignation Wednesday.
Now come reports that officials are looking into other companies Alice was working with. Bloomberg reported, based on an anonymous source, that the Department of Justice is running multiple probes into Nvidia. One is focused on antitrust issues and two others are focused on Megaspeed—where Alice Huang was a former top executive—and Super Micro Computer. Separately, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan is probing whether entities linked to Alice Huang were involved in alleged efforts to smuggle Supermicro hardware laced with Nvidia’s red-hot GPUs into China. It is unclear whether that probe is tied to smuggling cases already brought in the U.S. or Asia. Neither Jensen Huang, Nvidia, nor Supermicro have been formally charged with any wrongdoing.
Supermicro stock tumbled 12% after U.S. markets opened this morning. The company did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
Thus far, much of the speculation about Jensen Huang’s catastrophic downfall as the leader of Nvidia has centered on Megaspeed, the Singapore firm that reportedly became one of Nvidia’s largest buyers in Southeast Asia. But Supermicro, the San Jose server maker run by Charles Liang, Jensen Huang’s friend of three decades and an important partner to Nvidia, has been in under the microscope regarding export-control compliance and is being pulled along with Nvidia.
Fortune has reported on the Supermicro case since before federal agents arrested its co-founder in March, and that reporting shows a company with a documented track record of governance and compliance failures. Despite its history, Supermicro has remained in lockstep with Nvidia. Liang and Jensen have shared the stage together at Computex in Taiwan, where Jensen was photographed in 2024 with Alice at a cocktail bar.
In March, federal prosecutors charged Supermicro co-founder Yih-Shyan “Wally” Liaw and two others with allegedly routing about $2.5 billion in servers laced with Nvidia H200 and B200 GPUs to China through a Southeast Asian front company. Bloomberg later reported the front company is OBON, a Bangkok-based AI infrastructure firm, which has not been charged. Supermicro was not charged and has said it was a victim of the scheme.
Liaw, who immediately resigned his executive and board roles at Supermicro following his arrest, has pleaded not guilty. His trial was pushed to March 2027 after Liaw’s lawyers told the judge in his case that subpoenas issued to Supermicro could be material to Liaw’s defense. Nelson Boxer, Liaw’s attorney, declined to comment.
One of Liaw’s co-defendants in the smuggling case, Ting-Wei “Willy” Sun, pleaded guilty in October, including to a charge that he deleted an encrypted messaging app from his phone on the day of the arrests. Sun’s attorneys did not respond to a request for comment, and it’s unclear if Sun has a cooperation agreement with the government.
There is no public evidence so far that the Supermicro and Megaspeed cases are directly connected but there are mounting threads. Thursday, Singapore’s Ministry of Home Affairs issued a statement noting that the Singapore Police Force and Customs had initiated investigations into Megaspeed and Alice Huang and in doing so sought information from Supermicro. Supermicro only offered “limited cooperation,” Singaporean authorities said.
In a July 2025 meeting, Singapore officials raised this with U.S. authorities and asked for their assistance in getting Supermicro’s cooperation and have repeated the request “on several occasions” to the Department of Justice and the FBI.
“Despite these repeated requests, Singapore has to date received limited information or assistance in respect of the company,” the statement reads. Supermicro did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Supermicro’s export-control problems did not start with Liaw’s arrest, Fortune’s reporting has found. In 2006, the company pleaded guilty to illegally exporting computer equipment to Iran through a distributor in Dubai, mirroring the basic scheme prosecutors alleged in the Liaw case.
Liaw himself has been through the crisis wringer before. He left Supermicro in 2018 amid a board-led investigation tied to Supermicro’s Nasdaq delisting and an SEC probe of its accounting, which ended with a $17.5 million settlement in 2020. Liaw returned as a consultant in May 2021, became a full-time employee, and rejoined the board in December 2023.
In 2024, short seller Hindenburg Research accused Supermicro of accounting manipulation and export-control failures and the company denied the allegations. Ernst & Young then resigned as auditor mid-audit, saying it could no longer rely on management’s representations. A special committee recommended in December 2024 that Supermicro replace CFO David Weigand and the company agreed to do so “immediately.” The company didn’t name a successor until October.
As Fortune has reported, the Liaw indictment describes thousands of nonworking dummy servers staged in warehouses to fool auditors, contractors using hair dryers to peel off serial-number labels, and a compliance auditor who was off-site allegedly enjoying “entertainment” paid for by another company during an inspection. It also shows how the alleged scheme fed directly into Nvidia’s supply pipeline. In December 2024, Liaw allegedly told the front company that “the only way” to get Nvidia to commit B200 chip allocations was to create monthly forecasts. Nvidia is not accused of wrongdoing in the Liaw indictment.
After Liaw’s arrest, Supermicro’s board opened its own investigation, overseen by independent director Scott Angel and former audit committee chair Tally Liu (no relation to Liang’s wife and co-founder Sara Liu). In August, Supermicro said that probe found no evidence that current senior management knew about the alleged scheme to diver the chips. The investigation resulted in an unspecified number of terminations in sales, business development, and technical support, Supermicro said at the time, for failure to follow policies or the code of conduct.
Supermicro has also disclosed a grand jury subpoena covering the Liaw case and the company’s compliance program and internal controls, along with subpoenas or inquiries from the SEC, the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security, and foreign authorities.
Through all that has beleaguered Supermicro, the company’s relationship with Nvidia has appeared to remain steadfast. This will all become a test for Supermicro’s new CFO, Mark Long, a former Western Digital finance chief who took over from Weigand last month and reports to Liang. The two tag-teamed the company’s most recent earnings call, when it reported record fiscal first-quarter revenue of $19.9 billion, well ahead of Wall Street consensus estimates. Supermicro also raised its full-year revenue forecast to $72 billion to $82 billion.
But now, Supermicro—and its CEO Liang—is losing an important champion in Nvidia’s Huang. Liang built much of Supermicro’s AI-era business through the close relationship with Nvidia combined with Supermicro’s almost supernatural ability to get the newest GPUs to market quickly. Liang has also maintained a public friendship with Huang that included joint keynotes in Taipei before adoring crowds.
Nvidia will now be led in the interim by Kress while an outside investigation into the foreign intelligence operation will be run by former acting SDNY U.S. Attorney Joon Kim and powerhouse law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz.
Nvidia is slated to report third-quarter results on November 17, with Kress in place of Huang. House lawmakers have requested a closed-door grilling with Huang the following day. In January, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is likely to lead the Senate Banking Committee, and she’ll have subpoena powers. Warren has already sought answers from Nvidia about Supermicro and chip smuggling in June and she re-upped her request this week.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
