Servers packed with restricted Nvidia chips were sitting in a Shanghai data center in January 2025, when a Chinese company tied to Alice Huang, a businesswoman U.S. officials suspect of spying for China, pledged them as collateral for a loan, Bloomberg reported. According to a person familiar with the sale, some of those servers were originally sold to Aperia, a buyer in Singapore. For me, the national security question starts with that sale. Who was responsible for checking where those machines went from there?
Washington restricted H800 exports to China in 2023. Beijing could use chips like these to train AI models for military planning or surveillance. There’s enough in the filing to place the machines in Shanghai. The route they took from Singapore is still unclear, and the paperwork leaves open whether Alice Huang helped buy them.
Bloomberg checked the serial numbers with a person familiar with the sale, who confirmed that Aperia was Dell’s customer. Dell says it cut off Aperia Cloud Services in February 2025 over suspicions that equipment was being diverted. Aperia, an Nvidia cloud partner at the time of the sale, had bought 22 Dell servers. That February, Singapore authorities arrested Aperia’s CEO on charges of defrauding server suppliers. He pleaded not guilty, and Aperia denies wrongdoing.
The loan paperwork also lists 52 Super Micro servers with Nvidia H100 or H200 chips. Super Micro told Bloomberg it followed U.S. export rules when it sold them.
Alice Huang set up Shanghai Longteng. Its unit, Shanghai Longjie Yaoteng, filed the servers as collateral. She gave up her shares in 2017. By the time the unit put up the servers, Huang Yu held a majority stake in the parent. The Information identified her as Alice’s sister. The paperwork doesn’t tell us who made the purchase on the company’s behalf.
Megaspeed put a picture of the Shanghai facility in its 2024 investor deck. The slide billed it as the biggest AI site for the company Alice Huang founded in Singapore. It didn’t say the site was in China. Megaspeed has denied smuggling chips, and Nvidia declined to comment for Bloomberg’s report. Kang Wei, the facility’s president, is a longtime business associate of Alice Huang who, according to people familiar with the matter, was sometimes introduced as her romantic partner.
Singapore is still investigating Megaspeed. The Singapore Police Force (SPF) said it had insufficient evidence to establish that Alice Huang committed an offense related to the suspected false declarations. The Home Affairs Ministry explained why she was warned and barred from returning.
“SPF assessed that Huang had provided information which she knew to be inaccurate to SPF in the course of investigations, to downplay her role in Megaspeed.”
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNBC on Friday that Treasury, War, the U.S. Trade Representative and State had favored adding Megaspeed to the Entity List for months. That was about Megaspeed. The servers Bloomberg traced went through Aperia, a separate Nvidia cloud partner. He also asked whether Nvidia was selling to “what were obviously pass-through shell companies” and what it did to prevent leakage. He put the responsibility for the Entity List decision on Commerce:
“But Commerce has the pen — Commerce BIS has the pen. And you will have to ask them about their internal processes.”
Before Jensen Huang resigned as Nvidia’s CEO, three House chairmen had asked him to come in for a private briefing on November 18. If that briefing happens, I’d start with the serial numbers Bloomberg matched. When did Nvidia last have a location for each of those servers? Dell had seen enough to stop selling to Aperia. Did Nvidia learn why, and if so, when? I’d put the Aperia orders on the table and ask Nvidia to go through them, including anything still open or never delivered. What did Nvidia do about those orders after it learned what concerned Dell, if it did? Congress needs to be able to judge whether the restrictions can keep these chips out of China. If Nvidia can only trace the machines so far, its shareholders should hear where the company’s records end.