Nvidia’s link to Singapore’s Megaspeed is getting awkward. Before US Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned senior Trump administration officials about Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s alleged ties to a Chinese businesswoman, the New York Times had already rung the warning bells. Months before Nvidia launched its own independent investigation, the publication reported that the American intelligence agencies already suspected that the woman, Alice Huang, was recruited by China’s Ministry of State Security and used her company to import banned Nvidia chips in mainland China. Megaspeed is the Singapore-based firm where Alice Huang is a senior executive, and the company has reportedly spent billions of dollars in Nvidia chip purchases.
What Rubio’s memo reportedly said
According to a report by The NYT, Rubio oversaw a highly classified memo that circulated among senior administration officials in May. It warned that Jensen Huang had built a close relationship with Alice Huang, a Chinese citizen and senior executive at Megaspeed. The memo was based on intelligence gathered through electronic surveillance of Alice Huang. People briefed on the matter said the memo was shared with officials holding high-level security clearances ahead of Trump’s China trip in May. US officials suspected Megaspeed of illegally smuggling restricted Nvidia semiconductors into mainland China.However, an October 2025 report by the publication already red-flagged this, claiming that Commerce Department officials had been investigating whether Megaspeed – which has close ties to Chinese tech firms – is helping companies in China sidestep American export restrictions. The report says more than a half dozen current and former officials and others familiar with the companies said so, on condition of anonymity, because the examination is not public.The earlier report had described a scene from a humid June night the year before. Jensen Huang was holding court with several of Nvidia’s major Asian customers at a bar with sweeping views of Taipei. They stood and toasted the booming AI industry. Next to him stood Huang Le, also known as Alice Huang, a Megaspeed executive. Her company was poised to buy $2 billion of Nvidia AI technology over the next year. She and Megaspeed were little-known players in the AI industry, but their link to Nvidia and its chief had become a preoccupation in Washington.Not just US but Singapore police were also investigating Megaspeed for breaching local laws. The inquiry raises questions about how closely Nvidia tracks where its AI chips end up. It also highlights how easily American export laws might be sidestepped.
How Megaspeed got the chips
Megaspeed split off from a Chinese gaming company in 2023. It then set up a subsidiary in Malaysia that quickly bought nearly $2 billion worth of Nvidia’s most advanced products. Citing records from the trade data platform ImportGenius, most of those chips came from the US branch of a Chinese company that has already been sanctioned for providing technology to the Chinese military.Megaspeed has sent those chips to data centres in Malaysia and Indonesia that appear to serve customers in China remotely. That is not necessarily illegal, but it can be unlawful if done on behalf of a Chinese company.Another report from The New York Times, published last month, claimed that when US officials told Trump about a Chinese spy plot, he took no action. Reason: the report explains that the US was already leading China in the AI race and Trump did not want to ‘disrupt’ Nvidia’s chip sales, which were helping to drive the economy and the stock market, and of further complicating the trading relationship with China.Notably, none of the spying claims have been proven, and Nvidia’s board says it has no reason to believe national security or its trade secrets were compromised.