CRD.B

NVIDIA’S general counsel intervened in a US government probe of suspected smuggling of AI chips by Megaspeed International, questioning whether the Trump administration played a role in detaining an executive from the Singapore-based firm who’s now at the heart of a scandal threatening Jensen Huang.

In late summer 2025, Nvidia’s Tim Teter called Commerce Under Secretary Jeffrey Kessler, who oversees US chip export curbs, to ask about the Megaspeed investigation, according to people familiar with the matter.

Specifically, Teter wanted to know whether Kessler’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) was involved in the Singapore government’s recent detention of Alice Huang, a Megaspeed executive, according to the people.

Singapore police had brought Alice in for questioning and restricted her from leaving the country. BIS was not involved in that action, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity owing to the sensitivity of the matter.

Jensen on Sunday admitted to having an affair with Alice after previously lying about the nature of their relationship, which is now the subject of an investigation by Nvidia’s board. An Nvidia spokesperson said that Teter was unaware of the affair at the time he called Kessler about Alice’s detention in Singapore.

It’s unclear whether Teter made any specific requests of Kessler related to his agency’s investigation into Megaspeed, which was separate from Singapore’s. But in the weeks that followed, BIS staff were muzzled in their ability to look into the company, including a mandate that they route all requests of Nvidia through Kessler or seek his approval for outreach — a highly unusual step that remains unique to the chipmaker, the people said.

They were also told not to mention Megaspeed or Speedmatrix, the company’s Malaysian subsidiary, in external communications.

Teter, meanwhile, reached out directly to the agency’s staff, including requesting a meeting with one of them, according to some of the people. That BIS employee declined the meeting, and Teter responded that he didn’t understand why his request was spurned, since Kessler had granted him permission to communicate with BIS employees. It’s unclear exactly what Teter wanted to discuss with these individuals.

The employees forwarded the email to Kessler, who told them hours later to continue handling the case by the book, to which the employees responded: “10-4. Thank you.” Kessler didn’t otherwise weigh in on how the employees should proceed with the case, according to one of the people. The New York Times reported earlier on Teter’s outreach to BIS employees and their exchange with Kessler.

“BIS conducts all enforcement strictly by the book,” a spokesperson for the agency said. “BIS enforces aggressively across the board, including with respect to chip smuggling, and enforcement is at an all-time high.”

In late 2025, the Justice Department, which was working on the case with BIS — standard practice for any BIS investigation that turns into a criminal probe — requested that BIS pause its efforts, the people said. BIS has not made any progress since then, despite the agency having enough evidence to move forward.

It’s an extraordinary episode that raises questions about Nvidia’s ability to influence US investigations into breaches of China chip curbs, as well as what exactly Teter sought to do with any additional information about Alice’s detention in Singapore.

An Nvidia spokesperson, asked about the company’s intervention in BIS’s Megaspeed probe, said that Nvidia consults with government officials “to answer their questions, provide information we have gathered from the field, request their guidance and instructions and ask whether they have any follow-ups.”

“We work to resolve any allegations of ‘diversion’ promptly, to help government and our partners halt any would-be smugglers while serving the critical market of lawful customers that help America win worldwide,” the spokesperson said. “Unresolved questions about lawful business undercut longstanding US policy and hurt American economic and national security.”

Despite that stance, in the months after Teter’s initial call with Kessler, Nvidia gave BIS an incomplete account of its business with Megaspeed.

After several visits to Megaspeed’s data centres — 12 facilities owned by eight companies across three countries in South-east Asia — Nvidia had sent inventory checks to the agency and declared to Bloomberg News in mid-November 2025 that everything was where it should be.

The company also said at the time that it had asked the US government whether it needed to cut off business with Megaspeed, and was told no.

But Nvidia’s tabulations, as relayed to the US government, undercounted the number of chips it had sold to Megaspeed via hardware partners by 50,000 units, according to trade records analysed by Bloomberg. That’s worth billions of dollars.

After being pressed about the gap, Nvidia told Bloomberg in December 2025 that it had checked additional Megaspeed warehouses that contained the missing hardware, while declining to state exactly how many chips it found in those facilities or provide any further details.

Nvidia also declined to comment on significant additional discrepancies in Megaspeed’s data centre footprint, including that two of the eight data centre operators Nvidia told officials in Washington it had visited said they did not, in fact, have Megaspeed’s hardware — and that Megaspeed boasts something of a Chinese corporate twin. It’s unclear whether Nvidia has communicated with BIS or DOJ on these topics.

Since then, the largest of Megaspeed’s data centre landlords dropped Megaspeed as a tenant. Nvidia, for its part, has consistently declined to comment on whether it has completed any additional visits to that site or any of Megaspeed’s other facilities, despite pledging to do so nearly a year ago.

BIS, meanwhile, has declined to impose restrictions on Nvidia’s ability to do business with the firm despite calls for such a step from senior levels of the Trump administration. Megaspeed has categorically denied the chip diversion allegations, and said that its outreach to the US government about the probe has gone unanswered.

The company added that Singapore’s investigation “into activities related to alleged chip diversion concluded earlier this year with no adverse action against Megaspeed.” Bloomberg has been unable to reach Alice Huang despite repeated attempts over the past year. Megaspeed was not speaking on her behalf.

Around three months ago, Nvidia’s Teter had a call with someone else on Trump’s team — an official at the White House. He told this official, according to a person familiar with the call, that Alice is not as important in Megaspeed as she makes herself out to be, a likely reference to her statement on LinkedIn that she is the company’s CEO even though she doesn’t hold and has never held that role on paper.

Still, because of the bad publicity surrounding Alice, Teter continued, Nvidia had stopped doing business with Megaspeed.

That bad publicity began in October 2025, when The New York Times first reported that the US government was looking into the company. In November 2025, Malaysian trade records show, Megaspeed imported at least 17,544 of Nvidia’s GB300s processors, at the time the most advanced and sought after AI chips on the market, worth some US$787 million.

Today, Megaspeed remains an official Nvidia Cloud Partner — a coveted designation in the data centre world that Nvidia generally takes away from companies when they no longer do business with those firms. BLOOMBERG