A little-known Singapore cloud company has become the centre of the biggest governance crisis in the AI chip industry. Megaspeed, an Nvidia customer that reportedly bought almost $5 billion of the company’s hardware in three years, is at the heart of questions about whether restricted AI chips reached China through Southeast Asia. This analysis separates what has been reported, what the company and Nvidia say, and what is speculation about how such arrangements can work.

Megaspeed International is a Singapore-based cloud computing provider that began in 2023 as a spinoff of a Chinese gaming company and became an official Nvidia cloud partner the same year, according to reports summarised by IBTimes Australia. Reuters says it has subsidiaries in Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the US and Australia. The New York Times reported that Megaspeed bought nearly $5 billion in Nvidia AI chips and advanced hardware over three years, and that nearly $2 billion of them were installed in data centres in Malaysia and Indonesia that appeared to serve Chinese customers remotely. The Straits Times reported that its Singapore headquarters sat practically empty.

Megaspeed is now in the spotlight because of the controversy around Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang. Huang said on Sunday that he had been unfaithful to his wife but gave no details, according to Reuters. US officials reportedly suspect that a former Megaspeed executive, with whom Huang is reported to have had a relationship, is a Chinese intelligence asset. China’s foreign ministry has called the spying claim unsubstantiated and “a groundless accusation, slander and a smear,” and Reuters could not reach the executive for comment. The espionage allegation has not been publicly established, and the executive is not a subject of this article.

The investigations. The New York Times, as reported by The Next Web, said agents at the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security spent months investigating whether Megaspeed smuggled Nvidia chips into China. In August 2025, Nvidia’s general counsel emailed the agents, saying a senior Commerce official had approved the outreach. The Justice Department then asked Commerce to pause, and now runs a criminal inquiry, according to people the Times cited; TNW said it had not verified this. A Commerce spokesman said the department handled the case strictly by the book, the Justice Department declined to comment, and an Nvidia spokesman said the company contacts officials to answer questions and share field information. Singapore police said last October they were investigating Megaspeed over suspected breaches of local law, and Singapore said last month that the firm remains under investigation. Malaysia’s trade ministry has said it has not opened an investigation.

What Megaspeed and Nvidia say. Megaspeed denies wrongdoing. In a statement on Thursday, chief executive James Tan Yong Pong said the company takes US export-control obligations “extremely seriously,” that it cooperated with inspections by the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security, and that it has hired an American law firm for a “comprehensive census” of its GPUs. It said last December that a US official, Malaysia’s trade ministry and Nvidia had inspected it and found no evidence of illicit transfers. Nvidia said in October 2025 that it had visited Megaspeed’s operations and found no evidence of diversion. Nobody has been charged, and no court has found any export violation.

How such companies can be used (analysis, not a finding about Megaspeed). The following describes patterns that experts and officials have discussed in general, not what Megaspeed did.

• Remote access. Renting computing power from chips housed in third countries such as Singapore or Malaysia is, according to experts quoted in the reporting, currently legal under US rules. A company that owns restricted chips abroad can sell access to anyone, including Chinese firms. Ja Ian Chong of the National University of Singapore told Fortune that Chinese firms can access data centres there and that the ease of shipping through these countries makes them attractive to those trying to get around US controls.
• Intermediary purchases. The other route is buying chips through front companies and then shipping them onward, which can violate US export controls.
• Gaps in oversight. The reports suggest several weak points: customers who buy through partners rather than directly, inspections that sample sites rather than track every serial number, and offshore firms whose real ownership and customers are hard to see from outside. A GPU “census”, which Megaspeed says it is now commissioning, is an attempt to close that last gap.

What is changing. Regulators have started to treat the legal remote-access route as a policy target as well. The Financial Times reported last week that Oracle cancelled a roughly $7 billion deal to lease AI chips to Tencent under US pressure, and The Next Web said Nvidia told its cloud partners to cap Chinese business at 49% of capacity; both reports rely on unnamed sources. Malaysia began requiring permits for Nvidia chip exports and transfers in 2025. Axios reported that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick delayed a planned crackdown on companies suspected of diverting chips, and the Times said other agencies proposed adding Megaspeed to the entity list, a step Commerce has not taken.

What it could mean. If investigators conclude that large volumes of restricted chips served Chinese users, pressure will grow on Nvidia, its partners and regulators in Singapore and Malaysia to track chips by customer and by serial number. If they find compliance, the episode may instead show how much of the AI chip trade runs through legal but politically contested channels. A short seller, Culper Research, which holds a position against Nvidia, flagged the company’s exposure to China through intermediaries such as Megaspeed in May, a reminder that financial interests surround the story.

The market has already reacted. Nvidia shares fell as much as 8.8% on Monday, according to Bloomberg, and House committee chairs have asked Huang to attend a closed-door briefing on November 18. President Donald Trump has said Huang should remain chief executive. Everything about Megaspeed’s conduct remains an allegation or a question until the investigations conclude. This article is analysis, is for information only and is not investment advice.