Megaspeed bought nearly $5bn in Nvidia hardware over three years
A lottery retailer in rural Australia, a dilapidated storefront in Kuala Lumpur and a near-empty office in Singapore form the corporate picture of Megaspeed International, the company linked to the resignation of Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang. The firm is registered in Singapore and has affiliates across the United States, Asia and Australia, but people at its listed addresses told the Guardian they know nothing about the cloud computing business at the centre of a global spy scandal.
In Sydney, no signage, mailbox or physical presence suggests that Megaspeed occupies the 10th floor of a city-centre office building. When Guardian reporters visited the floor, which houses numerous businesses and hummed with activity, a receptionist asked, “Do you have an appointment?” No one there had heard of Megaspeed Australia or its listed director, 29-year-old Kai Kang.
Huang resigned as chief executive of the chip manufacturer on Friday after reports of extramarital affairs with an alleged Chinese spy and two company employees. US intelligence agencies believe Huang had been targeted by Alice Huang, the former director of Megaspeed International, who is no relation to him, and US officials believe Huang was acting as a Chinese intelligence asset, passing commercial information to Beijing, the New York Times has reported.
Authorities across the region moved against the company and its former director this week. Singaporean officials said on Thursday that Alice Huang had been barred from re-entering the city state following a 2025 investigation into Megaspeed. Singapore police said last October that they were investigating the firm over “suspected breaches of our domestic laws” after a US senator asked the commerce department to look into whether the company had diverted Nvidia chips. The ministry of home affairs said this week it had held Alice Huang’s passport from June 2025 until February over “potential false declarations” related to Megaspeed, and that she was eventually released with a stern warning.
Authorities in Taiwan said earlier this week that Alice Huang had also been barred from re-entering there. On Friday, Malaysia said it was investigating a subsidiary of Megaspeed International over the possible diversion of advanced AI chips to other countries.
The scale of the company’s purchasing gives those questions weight. Over the past three years, Megaspeed has been one of Nvidia’s biggest foreign customers, buying nearly $5bn in AI chips and advanced hardware.
Corporate filings trace the firm’s affiliate structure but reveal little about its operations. Megaspeed International filed papers in the US state of Delaware and with the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, known as Asic, showing the affiliates were created in 2024. Both filings list the Shanghai-born Kang as the sole company officer, either as director or president, and the Australian filing lists the Singapore-based parent as the company’s stockholder. Asic documents show Kang was born in 1996 in Shanghai and has been listed as Megaspeed Australia’s director since the company was registered; they also show that Megaspeed International owns all 10,000 shares of Megaspeed Australia’s stock, for which it paid $1m. Kang is additionally registered as a director of Megaspeed’s Malaysian, Indonesian and Thai units.
Reuters visited the home address given on the affiliate filings — a small store, news agency and lottery retailer in Seymour, Victoria, about an hour’s drive north of Melbourne. A woman who identified herself as Kang’s mother said she had run the business for about 16 years, that Kang was based in Shanghai, and that she did not know anything about the Singaporean company. “He doesn’t have any business here,” she said, adding that Kang had completed his master’s degree at Shanghai University and had visited his parents most recently in August and September. She said she knew about Nvidia and Megaspeed but that her son had nothing to do with the company in Singapore. Kang has not been accused of any wrongdoing, and attempts to contact him were unsuccessful.
Other addresses have proved similarly opaque. The Straits Times reported that Swiftdata, the little-known company that owns Megaspeed, had a registered business address in Singapore, but an interior design firm said it had occupied the premises for more than four years. The New York Times visited Megaspeed’s Singapore headquarters in the central business district last year and found only two employees present. In neighbouring Malaysia, the Times found one Megaspeed office in a dilapidated storefront in the capital and another in a shopping mall; when an employee emerged at the mall and was asked what the company did, she said, “It’s not clear.”
In Australia, a former intelligence officer said they expected Australian security agencies would have sought briefings from overseas counterparts about Megaspeed or undertaken their own assessments of the local subsidiary this week. Michael Shoebridge, the director of the security thinktank Strategic Analysis Australia and a former deputy of the Australian Signals Directorate and the Defence Intelligence Organisation, said key details about Megaspeed’s relationship with Chinese intelligence remained unclear. He suggested it would be “credible” to assess the company as a “front for Chinese intelligence,” but said nothing was certain, and added that the Australian operation could be a legitimate business or a device to make the Singapore-based parent company “look credible” by having overseas affiliates.
The Chinese government has flatly rejected any claim that Alice Huang was a spy. Foreign ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said earlier this week that the allegations were “unsubstantiated” and “nothing but smears against China.”
Australian officials declined to comment or responded generally. Asio declined to comment when asked whether it was examining Megaspeed Australia, as did the office of the home affairs minister, Tony Burke. Asked on ABC TV this week whether there had been discussions inside government “about some of the potential spying that could be taking place within Australian companies,” the acting prime minister, Richard Marles, said on ABC radio, speaking generally, that “We are living in a world where there is more espionage than there has been for a long time. A lot of that is particularly around emerging technologies.” The federal opposition said any potential foreign interference “must be taken seriously.” An email to the Victorian newsagent and messages to its Facebook page requesting comment went unanswered on Thursday.