Singapore bans Alice Huang as Nvidia chip-diversion probe widens

Singapore slammed the door on Alice Huang, the businesswoman at the center of the scandal that ended Jensen Huang's run as Nvidia CEO. The city-state said Tuesday it barred her from re-entering after finding she gave inaccurate information to downplay her role at Megaspeed International, where she was CEO, chairperson and a key controller. Police had interviewed the Hong Kong resident in June 2025; by February 2026 authorities concluded there was insufficient evidence she committed offenses tied to the declarations under investigation. She still doesn't get back in.

The case around her keeps growing. On Friday a fifth person was hit with 41 charges in a Singapore fraud case involving computer servers that might have contained Nvidia chips and were exported to Malaysia, with alleged transactions in the broader case totaling about $390 million, prosecutors said last March. Investigators have been looking into several companies and key officials, including Megaspeed, since February 2025, and those probes were still open as of Thursday.

At issue: whether servers shipped through Singapore to Malaysia without entering the domestic market got rerouted somewhere else, contradicting declarations filed in Singapore, the Ministry of Home Affairs said in a late Thursday statement. Singapore doesn't enforce other countries' unilateral export controls, the ministry said, but it expects companies there to weigh foreign export rules in their international business.

Washington's fingerprints are all over this. The U.S. has restricted exports of Nvidia's sharpest AI chips to China since 2022. Nvidia's revenue linked to Singapore climbed to 22% in the fiscal quarter ending July 2025, up from 8% in 2023 — though Singapore's trade ministry estimates chips physically delivered there made up less than 1% of the chipmaker's revenue. Megaspeed, spun off from a Chinese gaming company, became Nvidia's largest Southeast Asian customer in under three years and bought more than $4.8 billion worth of chips since June 2024, according to The New York Times. It denies wrongdoing.

Singapore says it isn't getting much back from the U.S. It first raised the matter with U.S. authorities in July 2025 and repeated the request several times from September last year, but received limited information or assistance about Super Micro Computer, the U.S. server supplier police wanted details on, according to Thursday's statement. Chris McGuire, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a former U.S. national security official, called Southeast Asia a major hub for chip smuggling and export control circumvention, importing tens of billions of dollars' worth of AI chips a year. Alvin Camba of AI risk firm Lyvi pointed to blind spots between trade-flow and banking-flow monitoring, plus corporate secrecy rules that make the true recipients of goods hard to pin down.