Megaspeed says suspected China spy linked to Jensen Huang left executive role in August
Megaspeed said Alice Huang, a suspected China spy linked to Nvidia’s former chief executive Jensen Huang, left her executive role at the Singapore company in August last year. Jensen Huang resigned as Nvidia’s CEO after it emerged he had allegedly had affairs with Alice Huang and with one of his employees. Megaspeed is the largest buyer of Nvidia chips in south-east Asia, and the Nvidia scandal has raised questions over whether high-end AI chips may have reached China despite U.S. export restrictions. Nvidia is banned from selling its advanced chips to China. Megaspeed is suspected of giving Chinese firms backdoor access via data centres in Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand.
On Sunday the company opened an internal investigation and said it had retained external legal counsel. It said it conducts legitimate and lawful business, designs its supply-chain controls to meet applicable rules including U.S. export controls, and that media assertions about its operations are not supported by verifiable evidence. On Friday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNBC that several agencies had favoured putting Megaspeed on the entity list — which restricts U.S. trade with overseas firms and individuals — for months, but blamed Howard Lutnick’s Commerce Department, which “has the pen,” for weak oversight of high-end chip exports. Lutnick is due to testify before the Senate Banking Committee next month; other committees have asked him and his department to retain records on Nvidia and Jensen Huang. Singapore does not enforce other countries’ unilateral export controls but expects firms on its soil to respect them. China has denied Alice Huang is a spy and warned Washington not to use the scandal as a “pretext for imposing a technological blockade” on AI.
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