Edit 12/25/2025 5:45am PT: An Nvidia spokesperson has sent the following statements to Tom's Hardware Premium:
“We have repeatedly visited Megaspeed’s facilities and observed a cloud service permitted under the export rules, with no evidence of diversion. Our visits confirmed the GPUs are where they are supposed to be. We will continue spot‑checks consistent with our practice.”
"By design, the export rules allow clouds to be built and operated outside controlled countries. Winning those clouds will decide the AI race and bring tens of billions of dollars and high‑paying jobs home. Export controls forfeited the world’s second‑largest commercial market to foreign competitors—America cannot afford to lose all of Asia next.”
Original coverage follows:
When U.S. lawmakers tightened export controls on advanced AI processors, their goal was straightforward enough: slow China’s access to cutting-edge compute hardware by restricting direct sales of the most capable GPUs. Three years later, the policy is colliding with the realities of globalized supply chains, reseller-driven distribution models, and explosive demand for AI accelerators.
Nothing has made that collision clearer than the scrutiny that Megapseed International is currently facing. Megaspeed — formerly 7Road International, a Chinese gaming company with ties to the state — describes itself as a “premier business partner of Nvidia” that specializes in AI computing resources.
The company has rapidly become Nvidia’s largest buyer in Southeast Asia, and U.S. officials and Singaporean authorities are examining whether Megaspeed acted as a conduit for restricted Nvidia AI chips ultimately destined for China. According to a special report by Bloomberg, the scale and speed of Megaspeed’s purchases, combined with gaps between its declared data center capacity and the volume of hardware imported, have raised questions about whether U.S. export controls are being circumvented through third-party jurisdictions.
While Nvidia has said it has found no evidence of chip diversion in the past, this latest episode concerning Megaspeed highlights the broader problem of export controls, which are stringent on paper but increasingly difficult to enforce in practice once hardware passes through layers of intermediaries.
Nvidia’s channel model complicates enforcement
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