SINGAPORE / WASHINGTON — What began as a personal controversy surrounding Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang has rapidly escalated into a high-stakes national security crisis over global AI semiconductor supply chains.

At the epicenter of the unfolding probe is Megaspeed International, a Singapore-registered entity heavily influenced by Alice Huang (Huang Le), a Chinese-born executive caught in a web of espionage allegations. While outwardly presenting itself as a fast-rising Southeast Asian cloud and data center newcomer, investigators increasingly view Megaspeed as a sophisticated front engineered to bypass U.S. export controls on advanced AI hardware.

Explosive Growth and "Ghost" Offices

Megaspeed’s financial trajectory has defied conventional market logic. According to international reports, the company’s assets skyrocketed 91-fold in just one year, surging from $33 million in 2023 to $3 billion by 2024. Over the same period, its revenues leaped from near-zero to $294 million, even as it posted a net loss of roughly $20 million in 2024.

Despite starting as an obscure startup, Megaspeed procured over $4.6 billion worth of cutting-edge Nvidia GPUs between 2023 and 2025. Its Malaysian subsidiary, Speedmatrix, reportedly acquired an additional $2 billion in hardware.

Yet behind these staggering figures lay a corporate shell. Local reporters and investigators found that Megaspeed’s Singapore office was often dark and operated merely as a virtual address serviced by a corporate registry agency. On-site inspections revealed a starker reality: warehouses supposedly housing active data centers were stacked with crates of unopened, flagship Nvidia accelerators left sitting idle, drawing intense scrutiny from U.S. regulatory investigators.

The "Singapore Laundering" Network

U.S. intelligence agencies and tech investigators view Megaspeed as part of a multi-national smuggling network tightly linked to Beijing. Alice Huang reportedly operated a web of front companies spanning China, Singapore, and Malaysia alongside her partner Kang Wei, founder of Chinese private equity firm Heros Capital, and her sister Huang Wei.

Their strategy relied on high-level "national laundering." To circumvent Washington’s tightening tech sanctions, the network established a neutral-jurisdiction footprint in Singapore and built auxiliary data centers in countries like Malaysia. From there, they funneled computational power or directly diverted hardware to mainland giants like Alibaba and Tencent. Investigators estimate that roughly 240,000 advanced Nvidia GPUs (including H100 and H200 models)—valued at approximately $7.5 billion—were illicitly routed to China through this pipeline.

Nvidia’s Confounding Defense

One of the most contentious aspects of the scandal is Nvidia corporate headquarters’ unexpectedly defensive stance regarding Megaspeed. When U.S. Commerce Department officials and Singaporean regulators launched investigations into Megaspeed’s suspicious import activities late last year, CEO Jensen Huang publicly dismissed the concerns, claiming his team had conducted audits finding no evidence of diversion. Whistleblower reports further allege that senior Nvidia executives directly lobbied export control officials to check the status of the probe.

Even after Alice Huang fled to Shanghai to evade authorities, Megaspeed reportedly retained its official Nvidia cloud partner status, continuing to import next-generation chips such as the GB300 series.

What began as a private scandal has now drawn the full force of the U.S. Department of Justice, the FBI's counterintelligence division, and plans for congressional export control hearings. In the crossfire of the global technological hegemony race, Megaspeed stands as a glaring testament to how state-backed procurement operations can infiltrate the very heart of the private tech sector.

[ⓒ Global Economic Times. 무단전재-재배포 금지]