$4.8 billion chip puzzle: How Nvidia's Megaspeed connection unravelled an alleged honeytrap plot

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's admission of having an affair is part of a bigger probe that has been ongoing since the Biden administration was about to wrap things up at the White House. Alice Huang, the woman he allegedly had an affair with, was an executive at Megaspeed International, a Singapore-based cloud compute and data-centre provider that had been under the radar of the US Commerce Department for more than two years.

There are allegations that the company was used to evade US chip sanctions. Under US export controls, direct sales of high-performance AI chips, like Nvidia's A100 and H100 lines, to mainland China are strictly restricted without specialised licenses.

Between mid-2024 and early 2026, Megaspeed emerged as a major global buyer of high-end Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs). According to trade and transaction records, cited by The New York Times, Speedmatrix, a Malaysian subsidiary of Megaspeed, purchased over $4.8 billion worth of advanced AI processors and server hardware between June 2024 and February 2026. Megaspeed developed data centres across Southeast Asia, including in Malaysia and Indonesia, and provided computing capacity to Chinese clients, including Alibaba.

Also Read: Who is Alice Huang, the woman Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang allegedly had an affair with?

The scale of the dealings made US authorities suspicious, who scrutinised whether Megaspeed was acting as a third-party intermediary, and routing or smuggling advanced chips and server infrastructure to Chinese entities via Southeast Asian hubs. During a 2024 inspection of a Megaspeed facility in Malaysia, investigators reportedly discovered significant quantities of high-end AI hardware sitting uninstalled in original shipping crates. This raised doubts about whether the equipment was intended for domestic deployment or diversion.

Also Read: Nvidia opens investigation after CEO Jensen Huang admits affair with alleged Chinese spy

The matter turned into a national security issue after The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times reported that US intelligence has been monitoring Alice Huang. They assessed whether Alice Huang had been recruited by China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS) to gather intelligence on Western AI technology supply chains. While she was being electronically monitored, US intelligence agencies picked up contact with an American whose name was initially masked, who was later revealed to be Jensen Huang.

Personal and professional interactions between Alice Huang and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang were scanned to know if Chinese intelligence was using commercial channels and executive relationships to gain insights into Nvidia's hardware allocation, supply timelines, or lobbying efforts to ease export restrictions.

Nvidia and Jensen Huang response

On October 29, when the NYT report came out, Nvidia described meetings with Alice Huang as routine contact with a customer. Its spokesman said customers received ordinary business information and had no access to trade secrets. Jensen Huang also told Bloomberg meetings with Alice Huang were limited to Megaspeed and "completely normal and not unusual." Nvidia said an internal board probe found no evidence of national security breaches or trade secret leakage. Jensen Huang did acknowledge he made personal relationship misjudgments and was "unfaithful" to his wife.

What Singapore and China said

Meanwhile, the Singapore government clarified that Alice Huang was never investigated for espionage nor brought in for intelligence questioning. However, authorities confirmed an ongoing domestic investigation into Megaspeed regarding corporate fraud and supplier misrepresentations. China has further dismissed the allegations as "groundless speculation" and anti-China politicisation of normal commercial tech trade.