Behind Jensen Huang’s Gossip: The Compute Power Leasing Business Routing Through Southeast Asia

Author: David, TechFlow

Jensen Huang has admitted it.

On November 8, NVIDIA released a letter he wrote to all employees. The 63-year-old Huang acknowledged his infidelity with his wife in the letter and wrote, "I owe my family and all of you an apology." Later that day, NVIDIA's board announced the launch of an independent investigation.

The letter did not mention a name, but everyone knew it referred to Alice Huang, a former executive at the Singapore-based company Megaspeed.

Their connection actually left traces long before this.

In June 2024, someone posted a photo on LinkedIn showing Alice Huang and Huang drinking whiskey at a bar in Taipei, along with executives from suppliers like Gigabyte. According to foreign media citing a witness's recollection, Alice Huang had told everyone she could get Huang to show up, and he actually did.

Last month, in an interview with Bloomberg, Huang also stated that their interactions were related to Megaspeed's business and were "completely normal."

So throughout the day, the topics most discussed were Huang's private life and NVIDIA's (NVDA) stock price.

But few people asked how a relatively unknown Singaporean company managed to get its executive to invite the CEO of the world's most valuable company out for drinks.

Megaspeed was founded in 2023 and was virtually unheard of outside tech circles until last month; but what you might not know is that it is NVIDIA's largest partner in Southeast Asia.

According to trade records cited by The New York Times, between June 2024 and February 2026, its affiliated company in Malaysia purchased at least $4.8 billion worth of AI equipment containing NVIDIA chips.

This equipment was installed in data centers across Malaysia and Indonesia, with computing power then leased out. According to reports from The New York Times and others, one of the major clients is Alibaba.

Evidently, this business exploits a loophole in US export controls.

US regulations govern the transit of chips, not the online leasing of computing power. As long as the GPUs remain in Johor, Malaysia, and engineers in Hangzhou submit training tasks online, it does not constitute an export under current US rules. The industry refers to this as "overseas training, domestic inference," running training abroad and bringing inference back home.

Chips stay in-country, but computing power flows outward.

If Megaspeed only did this, it would merely be a secondary landlord of computing power operating in a regulatory gray area. But what kept the US Department of Commerce on edge was an on-site inspection at the end of 2024. Investigators entered its facility in Malaysia and found a batch of NVIDIA servers still sealed in boxes.

Chips Sealed Inside Megaspeed Boxes

For companies engaged in computing power leasing, the worst fear is idle GPUs.

GPUs depreciate daily, new models replace old ones annually, and every day an unpowered card sits unused represents a loss. So when investigators saw the untouched servers in Malaysia, their suspicion was natural:

This batch of goods may never have been intended for use here.

A year later, Bloomberg revealed more details in a report. Customs records from Malaysia and Indonesia show that Megaspeed imported approximately 136,000 NVIDIA chips, over half of which are the latest-generation Blackwells, with most arriving over six months ago.

Yet when NVIDIA sent personnel to inspect the facility, only a few thousand Blackwells could be counted on site.

NVIDIA's initial explanation was that the unassembled chips were simply stored in warehouses, each accounted for, and none were found to be diverted to China. A NVIDIA spokesperson also stated that Megaspeed operates a "small commercial cloud" and, like many similar companies worldwide, stays within the bounds allowed by US regulations.

Meanwhile, Megaspeed issued its own statement denying involvement in any illegal shipments.

However, the company's origins are anything but "small." According to foreign media, its predecessor was the Singapore subsidiary of Chinese gaming company 7road (0797.HK), spun off five months after the US issued its October 2022 chip ban on China. It was first transferred to a British Virgin Islands company controlled by Alice Huang, and then sold in November 2023 to Swiftdata, a shell company owned by Singaporean businessman Tan Yong Pong.

Four days after changing hands, it became a cloud partner of NVIDIA.

The fact that a newly restructured company could secure this status so quickly indicates that, in NVIDIA's eyes, it is a major client worth prioritizing. But if evaluated against the standards of a typical computing power company, its fundamentals fail to add up almost everywhere.

The most glaring inconsistency is financial. At the end of that year, the company held only $5.7 million in cash on its books, yet within less than two years following that, the value of the NVIDIA equipment it imported exceeded that cash balance by more than eight hundred times.

Computing power leasing is inherently a capital-intensive business; funding GPU purchases through financing or customer prepayments is standard practice. However, who is filling such a massive financial hole remains unclear to outsiders to this day.

The supply chain of these goods can be traced, though the findings only make things increasingly difficult for the US authorities. When Megaspeed ordered the GPUs, its orders went to Aivres, an affiliate of Inspur in the United States.

Inspur is one of China's largest server manufacturers and was previously placed on the US entity list, yet its US affiliate still managed to secure NVIDIA hardware. This means that virtually every company handling these chips—from factory gate to installation—has some ties to China, despite none appearing on US blacklists.

At the same time, the Megaspeed entity itself shows no signs of managing such a massive operation.

Reporters from The New York Times visited its offices on-site and found only two employees in Singapore, both of whom were unfamiliar with the company's operations; the Malaysian office was equally modest, with no engineers in sight.

The official website states its data centers are located in Malaysia and Indonesia, yet according to a 2024 financing document provided by Bloomberg, it pitched potential investors on a third data center situated in a "specific region," without specifying the exact country.

Perhaps what makes Megaspeed truly valuable is precisely this corporate structure.

A company with barely visible staff manages to sustain a multi-billion-dollar computing business. Clients may be in China, machines sit in Malaysia, and equity hangs in Singapore and the British Virgin Islands—every link deliberately positioned outside the reach of US chip export controls.

Computing Power Exports, Uncontainable Remote Flows

Between tightening physical embargoes and colossal demand for computing power, capital and technology constantly seek the most effective pathways for flow.

From an enforcement perspective, the US Department of Commerce regulates where a chip is shipped from and to, and who buys it. What happens after installation—which entity leases computing power via the network—falls into a shadowy zone beyond direct export control.

Thus, entities following this model are likely far more numerous than just Megaspeed.

According to successive foreign media reports, INF Tech leased 2,300 Blackwells through an Indonesian data center; Tencent signed a contract worth approximately $1.2 billion with Japan's Datasection, corresponding to 15,000 Blackwells; and early this summer brought news that Moonshot AI began utilizing GB300s through facilities in Thailand...

Individually, none of these transactions cross the line: chips do not leave the country, and the users of the chips do not own them.

Washington has indeed noticed this loophole. This past January, the US House of Representatives passed the Remote Access Security Act by a vote of 369 to 22, aiming to classify remote access to controlled chips as exports, but the legislation remains stalled in the Senate.

According to The Information, the Commerce Department is also drafting rules targeting remote computing power, though they have not yet been made public.

For domestic AI companies relying on "overseas training, domestic inference" to plug their computing gaps, this path remains viable for now, albeit becoming progressively costlier and more uncertain. Huang's scandal has thrust Megaspeed into the spotlight, prompting every secondary computing provider in Southeast Asia catering to Chinese clients to reassess their client lists.

This brings to mind recent discussions about tokens going global, where Chinese-made models sell cheap tokens worldwide. Yet few have considered that part of the computing power used to train these models may itself have been rented from overseas.

Long before Huang's gossip dominated headlines, Megaspeed's own expansion had already been underway.

Despite suspending its procurement of NVIDIA hardware since July 2025, according to The New York Times, its large-scale data center project in Johor is still under rapid construction, with new AI server rooms emerging amidst palm oil plantations. The report also noted that the company already possesses the critical chips needed for the expansion.

Questions An Apology Letter Cannot Answer

Looking back at the apology letter, what Huang admitted to is actually the easiest part to acknowledge in the whole affair.

An extramarital affair is a matter of personal conduct, damaging only his family and his personal reputation. A NVIDIA spokesperson put it more bluntly: today's news will not slow NVIDIA down.

One individual admitting a misstep in their private life operates on a completely different scale than a corporation acknowledging that its key client might be problematic. The former is Huang's personal matter; the latter becomes NVIDIA's responsibility.

Clients like Megaspeed represent an often-hidden pillar of NVIDIA's growth over the past two years. Huang himself has noted that NVIDIA's market share in China has dropped from 95% to zero. While the most advanced cards cannot be directly sold into China, the demand for computing power from Chinese companies persists—they've simply changed their shipping address to continue placing orders from data centers in Southeast Asia.

If this scandal is ultimately deemed to indicate that NVIDIA has been infiltrated, the crackdown will target not just Megaspeed, but the entire "Southeast Asian data center plus Chinese client" channel. For NVIDIA, every transaction flowing through this corridor represents genuine, hard-won orders.

Chips can be locked behind national borders, but computing power slips out over a single fiber optic cable. In the age of AI, the boundaries of the computing business are no longer drawn by customs inspectors.

Huang has taken responsibility for his mistakes in the letter. As for the business operating along this channel, an apology letter holds no answers.