Banned Nvidia Chips Reached a Shanghai Data Centre Through a Firm Alice Huang Founded

Alice Huang is at the centre of the controversy that has engulfed Nvidia since Jensen Huang resigned as chief executive this week. Megaspeed, the Singapore company where she held a senior role and one of Nvidia's biggest customers in South-East Asia, is under US criminal investigation over alleged chip smuggling into China. Until now, links between Megaspeed and the Shanghai site rested mainly on investor presentations and corporate records. The documents Bloomberg describes tie specific restricted hardware to the facility, and to a network of Chinese companies around Huang.

The company in question is Shanghai Longteng, which Huang founded in 2015 and whose shares she sold in 2017. Filings with Chinese authorities show that a Longteng subsidiary pledged 193 servers as collateral for loans in January 2025. Bloomberg identified 74 of them: 22 Dell servers fitted with Nvidia H800 chips, which cannot be exported to China, and 52 Super Micro systems carrying H100 and H200 chips, which need a US export licence that was not obtained. The filings place the equipment in the Shanghai data centre.

Some of the servers had first been sold to Aperia Cloud Services, a Singapore-based company that was an official Nvidia Cloud Partner, a person familiar with the matter told Bloomberg. Aperia bought the 22 Dell machines. The documents do not show what part, if any, Huang personally played in buying the servers.

Aperia denies wrongdoing. According to Bloomberg, it declined to comment by phone on Thursday and did not answer emailed questions. Dell halted all sales and support to Aperia International in February 2025 over smuggling concerns. Nvidia has said Aperia was no longer an active customer by the time its chief executive was arrested, and has removed the company from its public list of cloud partners. In May 2025, Jensen Huang said there was no evidence that Nvidia chips were being diverted.

Megaspeed has said it will cooperate with the US investigation. Singapore said on Thursday that it had barred Alice Huang from re-entering the country in February after she knowingly gave police inaccurate information to play down her role at Megaspeed, and that she was not investigated for espionage. Beijing has denied allegations of spying.

The findings matter because they bear directly on the question Washington is now asking: whether US export controls failed to stop advanced Nvidia hardware from reaching China through intermediaries in South-East Asia, and who in government and industry should have caught it. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has agreed to testify about the administration's handling of chip sales to China, and lawmakers from both parties have opened inquiries into how the sales were approved and policed.

For Nvidia, now led by interim chief executive Colette Kress, the report adds a paper trail linking a former cloud partner's hardware to a company tied to the woman whose relationship with its founder cost him his job. The remaining 119 servers pledged in the January 2025 filings were not identified in the report.