Behind the Jensen Huang Gossip: The Compute Rental Business via Southeast Asia

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang acknowledged an extramarital relationship in a letter to employees on November 8, prompting the company’s board to launch an independent investigation; the disclosure centers attention on Alice Huang, a former executive of Singapore-based Megaspeed, Nvidia’s largest Southeast Asian partner. Megaspeed, spun out of Chinese game company 7road’s Singapore subsidiary after the October 2022 U.S. chip restrictions and later sold to a shell company owned by Singapore businessman Tan Yong Pong, bought at least $4.8 billion of Nvidia-containing AI equipment through its Malaysian affiliate between June 2024 and February 2026, housing it in Malaysia and Indonesia and renting out the compute—reportedly to customers including Alibaba. The arrangement exploits a gap in U.S. export controls: chips never leave Malaysia, so remote training by Chinese engineers is not treated as an export, a practice known as “training abroad, inferencing at home.” A late-2024 U.S. Commerce Department site visit found Nvidia servers still boxed, and Bloomberg later reported that of roughly 136,000 Nvidia chips imported—over half of them Blackwell—only a few thousand were installed, though Nvidia said all were accounted for and none transshipped to China. The case matters because similar remote-compute deals—INF Tech’s 2,300 Blackwell chips in Indonesia, Tencent’s roughly $1.2 billion, 15,000-Blackwell contract with Japan’s Datasection, and Moonshot’s use of GB300s via Thailand—are proliferating, while the House-passed Remote Access Security Act sits stalled in the Senate and Commerce drafts remote-compute rules; watch whether those rules close the loophole and how Megaspeed’s Johor buildout proceeds after it paused Nvidia hardware purchases in July 2025.