Around the time Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was photographed at a restaurant in Taipei last year with the woman who would lead to his resignation over an affair, the governments of Singapore and the United States were closing in on her.
A month later, Alice Huang, an executive at Nvidia customer Megaspeed whom U.S. officials suspected of being a Chinese intelligence source, was at a company site when it was inspected by U.S. officials tasked with enforcing export controls, according to Singapore’s government.
That same day in June 2025, her passport was confiscated by Singaporean officials who suspected Megaspeed was smuggling high-end artificial intelligence computer chips to China, in breach of U.S. restrictions on chip exports to the country.
Nvidia itself cut ties with Megaspeed the same month, blocking it from receiving existing shipments or placing orders for new chips, Nvidia spokesperson John Rizzo said Friday in a statement. The self-imposed ban on selling to Megaspeed, which had become a major customer for Nvidia between 2023 and 2025, is still in place, he said.
The episode provides a snapshot from the ecosystem of middleman companies in Asia that buy Nvidia chips and rent out remote access to them via the internet. Some exploit a loophole in export controls by serving Chinese companies barred from buying Nvidia chips themselves, the U.S. government has said, or break the law by smuggling the chips into China.
Jensen Huang’s affair and resignation have spurred congressional and government scrutiny of how much he and his company knew about the smuggling of their chips into China and cloud computing companies’ operations that provided a legal way around U.S. export controls.
The U.S. government is discussing ways to close the loophole that allows Chinese AI companies to remotely access Nvidia computer chips located in other countries, a senior U.S. official said Friday in a briefing with reporters.
Megaspeed did not respond to a request for comment about its customers. Rizzo did not say why Nvidia decided to cut off the company, and the chipmaker has previously denied enabling smuggling.
The investigations could pull in President Donald Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. Congressional Democrats — including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Massachusetts), who is poised to head up a key investigatory panel in the new Congress — have said they plan to look into the connections between Nvidia, Trump and U.S. export controls. A trio of Republican lawmakers have asked Huang to testify at a closed-door session.
Trump doesn’t plan on discussing the spying allegations with Chinese President Xi Jinping when the two meet on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in China this week, the senior U.S. official said.
Nvidia should have picked up multiple “red flags” about Megaspeed, said Chris Miller, a professor of international history at Tufts University and the author of “Chip War,” a history of the development of the global semiconductor industry.
“Megaspeed appeared out of nowhere. … It wasn’t a large-scale data center operator. And Singapore was investigating,” Miller said.
The Biden administration enacted strict export controls on AI chips in October 2022, arguing that cutting China off would help the U.S. maintain its technological and military lead. The restrictions changed the global landscape for Nvidia, the market leader for AI chips, and its sales in Asia quickly shifted.
Nvidia’s China revenue dropped from $7.1 billion in the fiscal year that covers 2021 to $5.8 billion in 2022. But the company began reporting soaring sales for Singapore, which jumped from $2.3 billion in 2022 to $23.7 billion in 2024.
The rise in Singapore revenue triggered concerns among national security experts that chips legally sold outside China were being diverted there. In February 2025, a Singaporean official told a parliamentary hearing there that although Nvidia had reported that 22 percent of its recent revenue was derived from Singapore, chips physically shipped into the country represented just 1 percent of the company’s total revenue.
The U.S. export restrictions were followed by rapid growth in AI data centers in Malaysia and other parts of Southeast Asia, according to a September 2025 report by international real estate advisory firm Knight Frank. Johor, the southern Malaysian state that borders Singapore, quickly became Southeast Asia’s fastest-growing data center hub, serving Chinese clients who often demand new data centers be built in less than a year, the report said.
The intense demand for Nvidia chips inside the Chinese tech industry also led smugglers to find ways around the export restrictions. Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Nvidia chips have been smuggled directly to China over the past several years, according to the Justice Department.
In December 2025, staff at the warehouse of a Southeast Asian tech company used a hair dryer to switch the labels and serial numbers on a shipment of computer servers and package them into boxes taken from servers loaded with powerful Nvidia chips, according to a Justice Department indictment filed in March and a letter from Warren.
The next day, workers showed the boxes to an export control officer from the U.S. Commerce Department, the indictment said. By that point, according to the indictment, the original contents of the boxes had already been sent to China, part of an operation that illegally shipped as much as $2.5 billion worth of servers containing restricted chips.
In March 2026, the Justice Department charged three people with conspiring to evade U.S. export controls, including a co-founder and board member of the U.S. server company, Super Micro, and one of the company’s contractors. The co-founder pleaded not guilty, the contractor pleaded guilty last month, and the Justice Department has said the third person charged remained a fugitive.
Super Micro has not been charged and has said it is cooperating with the investigation. The case is expected to go to trial in 2027.
American companies have been warned by the U.S. government to be wary of becoming tangled up in schemes to evade export controls. May 2025 guidance from the Commerce Department said companies must be vigilant of business partners potentially involved in the physical smuggling of AI chips or providing cloud access to such chips to China.
The agency said U.S. firms should take extra care when selling to companies that were registered after the introduction of export controls in 2022. And it warned that any U.S. person who had knowledge that their business partners may be helping Chinese entities train AI models could be subject to criminal or civil penalties. Megaspeed was previously the Singaporean arm of a Chinese video game company before changing its name and building out its data center business in 2023.
Jensen Huang in November 2025 denied that Nvidia chips were being smuggled on a Fox News podcast. “People talk about smuggling, but it’s incredibly hard to do,” he said. “We chase down every opportunity, every single time that somebody’s reported something, and it’s just not been true.”
The Megaspeed affair raises questions about how seriously both the U.S. government and Nvidia took their responsibilities to curb China’s efforts to get around export controls, said Sam Bresnick, a research fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.
“That’s on the Trump administration, but it’s also on Nvidia because they are supposed to be complying with export controls,” Bresnick said. “Given the concerns about Chinese smuggling of chips, concerns about chips in Southeast Asia disappearing, it would seem that this was at least potential willful negligence on their part.”
Ryan Fedasiuk, senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation, a think tank focused on tech policy, said the controversy is likely to trigger more action from the administration and Congress to curb chip smuggling.
Legislators have proposed new laws to tighten export controls on AI chips. In January, the House passed a bill that would bar cloud services from providing Chinese firms access to restricted chips. Another proposed law would require chip companies like Nvidia to add tracking technology to their products.
Rep. Bill Foster (D-Illinois) urged its adoption in a post on X last week. “Congress has the tools to prevent powerful AI chips from getting in the wrong hands and posing a national security risk,” he wrote.
“The administration understands the right thing to do, and the door has been flung wide open [for] Congress to act, to restrict,” Fedasiuk said.
Ian Duncan contributed to this report.
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