A ByteDance subsidiary quietly became the anchor customer for a UK cloud company built almost entirely around renting it Nvidia's most restricted AI chips.
Nscale, a UK-based "neocloud," filed for a U.S. IPO this month, and the paperwork revealed something the company didn't spell out in its main S-1: a $105 million loan agreement with Macquarie named Spring (SG) Pte Ltd, a Singapore-registered ByteDance subsidiary, as a major customer. Spring's contract to access 2,304 Nvidia B200 chips at Nscale's Glomfjord, Norway data center generated $24 million of Nscale's $33 million in 2025 revenue - nearly three-quarters of the company's business. The Financial Times reports the arrangement is legal: Spring rents compute abroad rather than importing chips into China, which is exactly the kind of workaround U.S. export controls have struggled to close. Macquarie was uneasy enough about the ByteDance link that it required Nscale to monitor Spring's usage and report "compute anomalies" that might signal a violation.
This is what export-control loopholes look like in practice - not smuggled chips, but rented ones, run through a subsidiary registered somewhere the rules don't reach. Nvidia has since poured over $2 billion into Nscale, and Microsoft signed a $44 billion deal that will shrink Spring's share of revenue below 20 percent - but that only happened after the Chinese money got the company off the ground. Washington has already moved to close the loophole that let foreign-based subsidiaries buy chips directly; whether renting arrangements like Spring's survive the next round of restrictions is still an open question.
A company can be fully compliant with the letter of export law and still end up as a case study in everything that law doesn't cover.