Megaspeed: the Singapore cloud firm at center of Nvidia scandal

Singapore-based cloud computing company Megaspeed is at the center of the Nvidia scandal, after CEO Jensen Huang admitted to an affair with an executive at the firm who U.S. intelligence believes is a Chinese spy.

Huang acknowledged his infidelity in a statement to staff on Sunday, following reports linking him to Megaspeed executive Alice Huang, CNBC reported. U.S. intelligence officials believe she is a Chinese intelligence asset, according to The New York Times. While Huang did not name Megaspeed or Alice Huang in his statement, he acknowledged the affair and said Nvidia’s board had begun an independent investigation regarding national security concerns.

Megaspeed sells cloud computing services to Asia Pacific companies that need large amounts of computing capacity, usually for AI projects. It advertises itself as a “core business partner” of Nvidia’s computing power cloud business in the region, allowing customers to rent computing power from Nvidia GPUs. The company has offices in Singapore and Indonesia, and it has previously faced scrutiny over whether some of its GPUs have been redirected to China.

What Megaspeed does

The service allows businesses to complete costly AI operations without buying and operating all the hardware themselves. It can also give customers remote access to computing power from advanced chips located outside China. U.S. controls restrict the export of some advanced chips to China, but remote access is a separate question, and Megaspeed’s business sits in the gap between the two.

The company’s model is the same as CoreWeave’s in the U.S.: buy Nvidia GPUs, put them in data centers, and rent access to customers who need computing power for AI workloads. The difference is that Megaspeed operates in Southeast Asia, where the regulatory environment is less restrictive and where the line between legitimate cloud computing and chip diversion is harder to police. The U.S. banned Nvidia’s most advanced chips from going to China, but a cloud provider in Singapore can buy those chips and offer remote access to customers anywhere, including Chinese companies that cannot buy the chips directly.

A report published by Bloomberg in December 2025 stated that the U.S. government was investigating Megaspeed’s ownership structure and whether it had smuggled Nvidia chips to China. A response published on Megaspeed’s website said the report contained “misleading information and incorrect insinuations.” It added that inspections by the Bureau of Industry and Security of the U.S. Commerce Department, the Ministry of Investment, Trade and Industry of Malaysia, and Nvidia had found “no evidence of any violations concerning the illicit transfer of chips or any illegal activities.”

Who is Alice Huang

Businesswoman Alice Huang is an “executive” at Megaspeed and a “publicly reported Chinese intelligence asset,” according to a House Select Committee on China statement on Nov. 5. Committee heads have requested Jensen Huang’s attendance at a Nov. 18 briefing to establish “the extent to which U.S. national security has been placed at risk” after reports raised “significant national security concerns regarding China’s access to sensitive U.S. technology and information.”

According to New York Times reporting, Alice Huang is a Chinese citizen who speaks good English and is well-connected among high-ranking chip industry executives. A memo was distributed among policymakers in the Trump administration last spring identifying a Chinese businesswoman with a close relationship with Jensen Huang as passing information about U.S. AI chips to Beijing’s top spy agency and seeking policy influence.

Bloomberg reports that Alice Huang also goes by Huang Le and helped set Megaspeed up in 2023, shortly after the U.S. issued its first chip export bans targeting China during the Biden administration. The timing is significant, because the export bans created a demand for remote access to advanced chips from outside China, and Megaspeed was positioned to fill that demand. Bloomberg previously listed her as one of the people collaborating with a Singapore police investigation into the company’s activities in relation to China. Singapore’s government has said it had not investigated Alice Huang’s alleged intelligence ties or her relationship with Jensen Huang.

The export control loophole

The Megaspeed story exposes the loophole that the U.S. has been trying to close since the first chip export bans in 2023. The bans restrict the sale of advanced chips to China, but they do not prevent a cloud provider in a third country from buying those chips and offering remote access to Chinese customers. The U.S. has tried to address this with “know your customer” rules and by pressuring allied governments to restrict cloud access, but the enforcement is difficult because the cloud provider is a legitimate business serving legitimate customers in a country that is not subject to the export ban.

The inspections that found no violations at Megaspeed are not necessarily the last word. The Bureau of Industry and Security can inspect a facility and find that the chips are where they are supposed to be, but that does not track what happens to the computing power that those chips produce. A GPU in a Singapore data center can serve a customer in China over the internet, and the inspection would not detect it. The loophole is not in the physical movement of chips but in the digital movement of computing power, and closing it requires a level of surveillance that the U.S. government has not yet implemented.

The House Select Committee’s request for Huang to appear on Nov. 18 is the signal that Congress is not satisfied with the inspection results. The committee wants to know the extent of the national security risk, and the Nov. 18 date is the day after Anthropic’s IPO prices and the day before it begins trading. The timing puts Huang in front of Congress at the moment when the AI sector is most exposed to a confidence shock, and the testimony could either calm the market or inflame it.

Huang’s China comments

The reports about the relationship prompted renewed scrutiny of Jensen Huang’s past comments on engaging with the Chinese market. He told CNBC’s Arjun Kharpal on Oct. 22: “No market is closed forever, and China wants foreign companies to invest in China, just as Germany wants foreign companies and countries to invest in Germany.”

“And so the market has to be open and it has to be welcoming. There’s no reason to believe that market is going to be closed to the best competitors in the world, and Nvidia is surely the best in the world at doing what we do,” CNBC reported.

What I think

Megaspeed is the company that the U.S. chip export control regime was designed to prevent, and the fact that it exists and operates openly in Singapore tells us that the regime has a gap that the government has not closed. The inspections found no violations, but the violations are not in the physical location of the chips. They are in the remote access that the chips provide to customers who cannot buy them directly, and no inspection of a data center in Singapore can detect a Chinese company using that computing power over the internet.

Alice Huang’s role in setting up Megaspeed in 2023, immediately after the first export bans, is the detail that makes this story more than a personal scandal. She is identified as a Chinese intelligence asset, and she helped create a company that profits from the export control loophole that the U.S. has been trying to close. The coincidence is too convenient to ignore, and the House Select Committee’s request for Huang to testify on Nov. 18 is the signal that Congress intends to press the question. The inspection results may be technically correct, but the question is whether the inspections were looking for the right thing.

Huang’s comments about the Chinese market being open to the best competitors are the kind of thing that a CEO says about a large market, and they are not incriminating on their own. But in the context of an affair with a Chinese intelligence asset who helped set up a company that profits from the export control loophole, the comments take on a different cast. The board’s investigation will have to determine whether Huang’s personal relationship with Alice Huang influenced Nvidia’s decision to make Megaspeed a core partner in the region, and whether that partnership facilitated the diversion of computing power to China.

The national security question is the one that matters. If Alice Huang was passing information about U.S. AI chips to Beijing’s spy agency, then the affair is not a personal matter but a channel for intelligence to flow from the CEO of the most important chip company in the world to the Chinese government. The board’s statement that it has “no reason to believe that either national security or Nvidia secrets were compromised” is a position of cautious optimism, not a finding of fact. The investigation by Wachtell, Lipton will determine whether that position holds, and the House committee’s testimony on Nov. 18 will determine whether Congress accepts the board’s findings. The stakes are the integrity of the U.S. chip export control regime and the confidence of the market in Nvidia’s leadership, and both are too large to be settled by an inspection that found no chips out of place.