Bloomberg Was Onto Megaspeed’s Game a Year Ago

Mackenzie Hawkins, Andy Lin, and Kari Soo Lindberg, reporting for Bloomberg last year on December 22 (Archive.today link): In an industry run by titans, a Singapore AI firm called Megaspeed International Pte. is drawing an unusual amount of attention. In less than three years, the once-obscure spinoff of a Chinese gaming enterprise has evolved into the single largest Southeast Asian buyer of Nvidia Corp. chips — a rapid ascent that’s lifted hopes for a regional champion in the lucrative business of AI cloud computing. Now Megaspeed finds itself a focal point of Washington’s long-held fears about semiconductor smuggling into China, an issue of escalating concern among national security hawks despite Nvidia’s repeated assurances that chip diversion doesn’t exist. [...] Nvidia, which conducts regular spot-checks of data centers around the world, told Bloomberg that it went to Megaspeed’s facilities multiple times to verify that there’s nothing untoward. “Our visits confirmed that the GPUs shipped to Megaspeed by our partners are where they are supposed to be,” an Nvidia spokesperson said in mid-November. It turns out these inspections were rather intimately thorough, conducted firsthand by Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang. Nothing untoward indeed.  ★