KUALA LUMPUR, Nov 13 (Reuters) – Malaysia is working to determine whether any chips brought into the country by SpeedMatrix, a local unit of Singapore-based cloud computing firm Megaspeed, were re-exported to other nations, the trade ministry said on Friday, amid allegations the company may have been used to circumvent US export controls on advanced semiconductors.
Megaspeed and its subsidiaries are under scrutiny after reports that former Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang had an affair with former Megaspeed executive Alice Huang, who is suspected by US authorities of spying for China.
Malaysia’s trade ministry said in a statement it had never “cleared” MegaSpeed International Pte Ltd or SpeedMatrix and that any verification visits it carried out at their local facilities were part of its regular monitoring of the data centre sector.
As a data centre tenant in Malaysia, Speedmatrix brought its own servers and AI chips into Malaysia for its operations, the ministry said.
It said it was now working with the customs agency to “determine whether any of the chips brought into Malaysia have since been re-exported to other countries, and whether such re-exports were carried out in accordance with the law.”
Malaysia last year imposed export controls on the movement of high-performance artificial intelligence chips of US origin. A trade permit is required for their re-export, transshipment or transit, and giving false information to customs about such goods was also an offence, the ministry said.
It said it was working closely with authorities in Singapore and the United States and was considering further measures to strengthen controls where necessary.
“While Malaysia does not enforce unilateral export controls imposed by other countries, all companies operating in Malaysia are expected to take such controls into account in their international business,” the ministry said, adding that it would take stern action against any company found to have broken Malaysian law.
(Reporting by Rozanna Latiff; Editing by David Stanway)
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