Jensen Huang is gone. Nvidia’s controls still need explaining - The Business Times

ON NOV 12, while Nvidia’s board met to decide Jensen Huang’s future, Megaspeed announced that it had hired a US law firm to run a comprehensive census of its GPUs (graphics processing units) and independently verify its export-control practices.

Two weeks earlier, on October 29, Huang had told Bloomberg that Nvidia had studied all of Megaspeed’s deployments and counted every one. At about 10pm Singapore time on Nov 12, Nvidia announced Huang’s resignation.

If every chip had already been counted, what was left for a law firm to count? Attention has gone to Huang’s private conduct, which belongs to his family, his board and investigators.

The question that concerns everyone else is about a system: how the controls meant to vet customers worked at a company that sells some of the most sensitive technology on earth.

For Asian conglomerates, regional banks and mid-sized exporters, this is everyday business. Before a large account opens, they establish who actually owns and controls the buyer, assess whether its business can support an order of that size, collect a statement of end use and, where needed, visit the site. When volumes jump, they review again.

In American and European multinationals, these checks are built into onboarding, and an account does not open until they are done. Companies a fraction of Nvidia’s size do it before they ship a single order.

So it is hard to understand how one of the most valuable companies in the world, selling technology that bears on national security, either skipped these steps or still cannot describe how it took them.

Somebody approved Megaspeed as a customer, then approved a larger order, then another. Somebody either judged the risk acceptable each time or wilfully ignored it. Who, and on what information?

Here is what the public record, assembled mostly by Bloomberg and The New York Times, shows. Megaspeed and its affiliates imported at least US$4.6 billion of Nvidia hardware, some 136,000 GPUs, between 2023 and November 2025, trade records show.

In November 2025 alone, Malaysian data show Megaspeed importing at least 17,544 Nvidia GB300 processors worth about US$787 million. Nvidia told US officials its inspections found the hardware where it should be.

Yet Bloomberg’s analysis found roughly 50,000 chips sold through a hardware partner missing from the tally Nvidia gave Washington. Nvidia later said it located additional equipment in other warehouses, but declined to say how many of the 50,000 it had found.

None of this amounts to a finding of illegality. Bloomberg did not establish a violation, and Megaspeed denies wrongdoing.

Then there is the partner badge. Nvidia says it stopped doing business with Megaspeed. Yet Megaspeed was still listed among Nvidia’s official cloud partners on Nov 10, a designation the chipmaker generally withdraws when a relationship ends.

A control that stops the shipments but leaves the endorsement in place needs an explanation.

Singapore’s part in this is the ordinary one of a hub. Goods and money from one place reach another through it, and every compliance officer knows that an invoice address is not a destination.

Nvidia’s own filing says customers use Singapore to centralise invoicing while products are “almost always shipped elsewhere”. Singapore’s Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) said on Nov 12 that it opened its own Megaspeed investigation in February 2025.

Tracing hardware once it leaves local jurisdiction, however, requires international visibility. While Singapore sought to verify the final destination Megaspeed declared, the MHA reported receiving “limited information or assistance” from US agencies and supplies.

This highlights a structural reality: A trading hub can check the paperwork it sees at its own borders but it cannot stand in for the seller’s knowledge of its customer. The question “if these chips are not staying in Singapore, where are they going?” belongs fundamentally to the seller, and it is the first line of any onboarding file.

Nvidia has more to answer. Why did a partner status outlive the relationship? Who noticed the gap between its tally and the trade records, and what followed? Who above management was watching?

Nvidia had no board chair until Nov 12. Its proxy statements describe an independent lead director instead, and say the arrangement provides independent oversight of management. If that oversight worked, what did the independent directors know about Megaspeed, and when?

Washington has started asking. Reuters reported that on Wednesday Nov 11, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Chris Coons asked the administration to preserve records on Nvidia’s chip exports and the Huang affair, citing concerns about the government’s ability to enforce export controls.

Nvidia’s independent directors have hired outside counsel to review the matter. A company this important cannot leave these questions to its lawyers. Its board should answer them in public.

Asia wakes to a chipmaker without its founder, and the region’s trading hubs have a direct interest in what comes next. They rely on sellers to screen the destination before an invoice is raised.

If a leading seller of sensitive goods did not, or cannot yet say how it did, the cost falls on the hubs that carry the paperwork, in the form of suspicion and tighter rules.

Jensen Huang’s resignation ends his tenure. It does not say how Nvidia decided whom to sell to. If those controls worked, the board should be able to show how. If they did not, the problem is larger than one man’s conduct, and a new chief executive does not fix it.

The writer, a former investment banker, is a technology journalist who writes about Asian business, technology, innovation and capital markets. He previously worked at GE Capital and Korea Development Bank group.

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