The source of the funding that the Singapore-based company must need to run a business on the scale that it does is unknown.
Alice Huang (Huang Le), the suspected Chinese agent involved with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (no relation), was briefly the CEO of Megaspeed. Megaspeed is a Singapore-based company, which entered the data center business in 2023, shortly after a Biden-era tightening of export controls on advanced chips. It became an official Nvidia cloud partner shortly thereafter.
In a recent release by the House Select Committee on China, Alice (I’ll use her first name for simplicity’s sake) was described as a Megaspeed executive, although her current role there (if any) remains unclear, as is the ultimate ownership of Megaspeed, which began life as the subsidiary of a large Chinese online company. In December Nvidia stated that Megaspeed was, Bloomberg reported, fully owned and operated outside China, with no Chinese shareholders. Its registered owner is a Singapore national. The source of the funding that Megaspeed must need to run a business on the scale that it does is unknown.
On its website, Megaspeed describes itself as “a core business partner of NVIDIA’s computing power cloud business in the Asia-Pacific region, [which] has gradually become an AI computing power cloud service provider in the Asia-Pacific region.”
As CNBC explains, a key business is:
allowing customers to rent computing power from Nvidia GPUs, or “graphics processing units” — specialized chips designed to do many calculations at the same time.
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.
In other words, renting hardware located outside China is (generally) allowed under U.S. law, but transferring the most advanced chips to China is not. The question has been whether Megaspeed had been involved in such transfers.
The New York Times (November 9):
The United States began investigating Megaspeed and Ms. Huang in 2024, after the company started importing billions of dollars’ worth of advanced Nvidia A.I. equipment into Malaysia. Megaspeed had been planning and constructing data centers around Southeast Asia to serve Chinese clients, including Alibaba, the Chinese tech giant. While that behavior is legal, U.S. officials were concerned that some of the Nvidia chips the company had bought were illegally routed into China.
It’s natural enough, given its size, that Alibaba would be a client, but it is also worth remembering that, although it would deny it, Alibaba or parts of it, is best regarded as an example of the harnessed capitalism that is the dominant economic feature of fascism with Chinese characteristics, and, as such, an enterprise (ultimately) working for the Beijing regime.
Megaspeed has denied any wrongdoing.