An investigation into a web of companies around Shanghai Century Litong says Alice Huang, a Megaspeed executive, helped move 240,000 banned Nvidia chips into China, mostly H100 and H200 systems.
The money is spread across several entities. An estimated $4.6B in AI chips came through Singapore-based Megaspeed from 2023 to 2025, and another $2B was routed through its subsidiary Speedmatrix. Separately, the investigation estimates that Shanghai Century Litong's total GPU purchases, including from other sources, came to about $7.5B, with Huang stepping in when orders hit trouble.
The timeline is tight. Shanghai Century Litong was founded in June 2023 by a shareholder ultimately controlled by Huang's sister, then won Nvidia Preferred Cloud Partner status in October 2023. That status requires a partner to show it can run Nvidia hardware and generate revenue at a certain level, which varies by region and partner type, and it gives priority access to scarce chips. The A800 and H800 were banned for sale to China around the same time, though stock already held by distributors was unaffected. The company went on to supply compute to Alibaba, Tencent and smaller labs.
The personal angle is the colorful part, but the corporate paper trail matters more. People who know Huang say she posted photos with Jensen Huang on WeChat and shared them with customers to build credibility, which is her own sales pitch rather than proof of influence. Corporate registration records and personal knowledge, not those photos, link her to the companies.
The enforcement trail is the harder part to wave away. The Bureau of Industry and Security found Nvidia hardware still in its boxes at Speedmatrix sites in Johor, Malaysia, and opened a deeper probe. It has been alleged that Nvidia intervened in that probe, and the company still holds its partner status. The Chinese embassy denies any links to Huang, and the FBI is looking into the matter.
The pattern is familiar from export controls generally: the rules bind Nvidia, but the chips move through resellers and shell-like intermediaries. What stands out here is the partner status, which the company reportedly received within months of its founding. The investigation does not explain how the company qualified.