Malaysia checks Megaspeed chip re-exports amid 917-server case

Nathan Brooks

Malaysia's Investment, Trade and Industry Ministry said on Nov. 13 that it had never cleared Megaspeed International or its Malaysian affiliate Speedmatrix; separately, a Singapore court charged a Chinese executive over 917 servers that may have contained Nvidia chips.

The ministry said it was working with the Royal Malaysian Customs Department to determine whether AI chips brought into Malaysia were re-exported and whether those movements complied with Malaysian law.

Speedmatrix operates as a tenant in Malaysian data centers and brings in its own servers and AI chips, the ministry said. Its officials' visits were routine sector monitoring, not regulatory approval. "Any suggestion otherwise is inaccurate," the ministry said.

Megaspeed, the Singapore-based Nvidia cloud partner at the center of the Jensen Huang scandal, denies wrongdoing. On Nov. 9, it said inspections by US and Malaysian authorities had found no wrongdoing.

What does Malaysia's permit regime cover?

Importing AI chips into Malaysia currently requires no permit. Since July 2025, exporting, re-exporting, transshipping or transiting high-performance US AI chips from or through Malaysia has required a ministry permit under the Strategic Trade Act 2010. Providing customs with false information about such goods is an offense under the Customs Act 1967.

The permit boundary is as basic as a warehouse door: entry and onward transport are separate legal acts.

The ministry said it was working with Singapore and the United States to strengthen safeguards and was considering tighter controls. "Malaysia welcomes investment in data centres and technology, but will not allow itself to be used to get around export controls," it said.

Earlier on Nov. 10, Trade Minister Johari Abdul Ghani said the government had received no evidence that Speedmatrix broke Malaysian law. He said authorities would act on credible evidence or a formal request from a foreign authority. The Edge reported then that the ministry had not opened an investigation.

Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim also said there was no evidence that Megaspeed-related AI hardware had left Malaysia and pledged cooperation with international investigations, according to Reuters, as reported by Tom's Hardware. For now, the ministry has opened a question rather than a case.

What are the 917 servers?

A Singapore court charged Shi Bingzhe, 34, a Chinese national and director of Superphi, with 41 counts of acquiring the benefits of criminal conduct. Shi also serves as chief operating officer of NJ Global Financial.

Prosecutors say the two companies bought 917 servers from Aperia International in 41 transactions between May 2024 and February 2025. Police said Shi and the companies had reasonable grounds to believe the servers were benefits of Aperia's alleged criminal conduct.

Superphi faces six charges, while NJ Global Financial faces 35.

• Each charge against Shi carries up to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to S$500,000.
• Each company faces a fine of up to S$1 million or twice the value of the benefits.
• A judge granted prosecutors' request for electronic tagging over the defense's objection; bail was offered at S$300,000.
• The case returns to court on Jan. 4, 2027.

Who else is charged, and what has been frozen?

Shi is the fifth person charged in the Singapore case, which now covers six companies. Four face July false-representation charges: Aperia International, A-Speed Infotech, Aperia Cloud Services (II) and Luxuriate Your Life.

Aperia Group chief executive Alan Wei Zhaolun, finance chief Jenny Lim and sales head Aaron Woon Guo Jie face fraud and money-laundering charges. Li Ming of Luxuriate Your Life faces fraud and fraudulent-trading charges.

Police have blocked the sale of a bungalow valued at about S$55 million and seized about S$1 million from bank accounts. CNBC, citing prosecutors, reported that alleged transactions across the wider case total about $390 million.

Investigators say the servers traveled through Singapore to Malaysia without entering Singapore's domestic market, and they are examining whether the hardware then went elsewhere. Singapore does not enforce other countries' unilateral export controls, so the charges concern fraud and related offenses rather than export-control violations.

The inquiry became public in early 2025 after a US probe into whether Chinese AI startup DeepSeek had obtained restricted Nvidia chips through third countries, including Singapore.

How does the Alice Huang case relate?

Neither government has linked the Aperia case or the Speedmatrix review to allegations against Alice Huang, a former Megaspeed executive. Some US officials have described Huang as a suspected Chinese intelligence asset; Beijing denies that, and the US Justice Department has said it has reached no conclusion.

Singapore's Home Affairs Ministry said on Nov. 12 that its separate investigations into Huang and Megaspeed began in February 2025 and remain active. In February 2026, Singapore barred Huang from re-entry after she gave police inaccurate information to downplay her role at Megaspeed.

On Nov. 12, Megaspeed said it had hired a US law firm to take a full inventory of its Nvidia GPUs and independently assess its export-control compliance. Megaspeed did not state how many GPUs it holds or what Commerce Department inspectors examined.

Southeast Asia's role as a route for restricted chips has drawn wider scrutiny. Reuters tallied more than $3 billion in Chinese data-center projects designed around banned Nvidia processors. A pending US Commerce Department rule addresses remote access to chips in countries including Malaysia and Singapore.

The Reuters figure concerns projects designed around restricted processors, rather than a disclosed count of shipped GPUs or earned revenue.

Neither government has set a date for those changes, so compliance timing may determine how quickly Nvidia-based capacity comes online in Malaysian data centers.