From Tom's Hardware: A Singaporean company with clear Chinese connections spent roughly $2 billion on Nvidia AI processors — and allegedly made them available for Chinese companies or re-exported them to China, according to a recent New York Times investigation. Companies from Singapore have long been suspected of procuring restricted AI accelerators from Nvidia to ship to China, bypassing U.S. sanctions. Although a few smuggling networks have been found, establishing a direct link has been tenuous until now.
In 2024, Singapore-based company Megaspeed was led by Alice Huang (no relation to Jensen Huang, chief executive of Nvidia), who was a little-known player in the AI or hardware industries, but who attended a party with the CEO of Nvidia at Computex 2024 after committing to buy $2 billion worth of Nvidia GPUs over the next year. Megaspeed emerged in 2023 when 7Road, a Chinese gaming and cloud-computing firm backed by state investors, created an offshore unit in Singapore. The new entity began purchasing massive quantities of restricted Nvidia AI GPUs, such as H100 and H800, which are officially not accessible to buyers from China.
A curious wrinkle is that Megaspeed did not purchase Nvidia hardware directly, but its procurements originated from Aivres Systems, a California-based arm of Inspur, a major Chinese technology company previously sanctioned by the U.S. for supplying the Chinese military with supercomputing hardware. Because Aivres operates as a U.S. company, it could lawfully purchase Nvidia products and resell them as long as they met U.S. export rules (which it did), exploiting a regulatory loophole that separated Inspur's American entity from its blacklisted parent.
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