According to Reuters Breakingviews, Singapore now faces intense scrutiny over the scandal surrounding Jensen Huang. Citing sources, The Information reported that Alice Haung, the alleged Chinese spy, who had a relationship with the Nvidia chief, enabled no less than $7.5 billion in chip exports to China. Since the episode exposes the Singapore's role in helping companies dodge US export curbs, any reaction it chooses could upset Beijing, Washington, or both.
Trust from Washington and Beijing alike is something Singapore has cultivated carefully, given that America is the largest foreign investor in the country while China ranks first among its trading partners. A reckoning over the superpowers' contest for AI supremacy was inevitable, and the scandal around Huang hints it has arrived early.
Alice Huang, a onetime Megaspeed executive at the Singapore-based neocloud, sits at the heart of the affair. Per The Information's sources, she assembled a web of firms spanning Singapore and China that funneled around 240,000 Nvidia processors to the People's Republic. Reuters Breakingviews noted that Beijing's foreign ministry has dismissed the spy allegations as "groundless."
Beyond the smuggling that vexes American officials, Chinese firms have a lawful route around export restrictions: leasing computing power from data centers, largely in Southeast Asia, run by operators such as Oracle. Singapore figures prominently here as well. DayOne, a Singapore-based operator, postponed last month its proposed US IPO valued at $5 billion, and a single customer was responsible for 69% of sales in the first half. Descriptions of that client in the prospectus suggest the customer is probably China's ByteDance.
Singapore has become a leading semiconductor entrepôt thanks to the AI boom. By customers' billing address, the city-state represented a hefty 18% of Nvidia's overall sales in the 12 months through January 2025, compared with 8% in 2023. Nvidia, which has since discontinued that breakdown, said then that clients consolidate their invoicing through the hub and that its products almost always ship to other destinations. Although such practice is lawful, a recent report by the US government names Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore as "permissive jurisdictions" in a number of smuggling cases.
Washington lawmakers had already begun working to seal loopholes, toughen controls and escalate enforcement before Huang publicly acknowledged cheating on his wife. On November 3, the Financial Times said, citing sources, that Nvidia directed its data center and cloud computing clients to allocate no less than 51% of their offerings to non-Chinese firms, and a few days before that the paper said Oracle had cancelled a $7 billion contract with Tencent to lease chips.
Prosecutions targeting individual chip smugglers have intensified in Singapore, yet the charges center on fraud and the laundering of money. The city-state has also stated that it does not police unilateral export controls set by other nations. Singapore may soon face US pressure to back Washington's stance more openly.
