Before Megaspeed, there was Supermicro: The other Nvidia partner tied to China chip smuggling—and to Jensen Huang
But Supermicro, the San Jose server maker run by Charles Liang, Jensen Huang’s friend of three decades and an important partner to Nvidia, has been in under the microscope regarding export-control compliance and is being pulled along with Nvidia.
Key points
- In March, federal prosecutors charged Supermicro co-founder Yih-Shyan “Wally” Liaw and two others with allegedly routing about $2.5 billion in servers laced with Nvidia H200 and B200 GPUs to China through a Southeast Asian front company.
- Thursday, Singapore’s Ministry of Home Affairs issued a statement noting that the Singapore Police Force and Customs had initiated investigations into Megaspeed and Alice Huang and in doing so sought information from Supermicro.
- Neither Jensen Huang, Nvidia, nor Supermicro have been formally charged with any wrongdoing.
Thus far, much of the speculation about Jensen Huang’s catastrophic downfall as the leader of Nvidia has centered on Megaspeed, the Singapore firm that reportedly became one of Nvidia’s largest buyers in Southeast Asia.
Additional details
- and Taiwanese officials, while also voluntarily providing information and engaging with all requests from Singapore authorities to date.” The company added that “Megaspeed is not, and has never been, a Supermicro customer.” Supermicro’s export-control problems did not start with Liaw’s arrest, Fortune ’s reporting has found.
- Whether she was a spy, a fixer, or just a paramour of Jensen Huang, the name Alice Huang (no relation) has roiled the business world this week following reports that the two were having an affair.
- There is no public evidence so far that the Supermicro and Megaspeed cases are directly connected but there are mounting threads.
- One is focused on antitrust issues and two others are focused on Megaspeed—where Alice Huang was a former top executive—and Super Micro Computer.
- Fortune has reported on the Supermicro case since before federal agents arrested its co-founder in March, and that reporting shows a company with a documented track record of governance and compliance failures.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
Advertisement
Every article behind this summary — 1 article from 1 outlet
Get stories like this in your inbox.
Subscribe — it's freeOne free email at 6am — your topics, deduplicated, five minutes. No account, no paywall.