C4ADS traces $4.6bn of Nvidia hardware to one Southeast Asian importer with unresolved ownership

Divide the research-institution total by the chip count and you get roughly $30,400 a unit: 56 chips, $1.7 million, July 2025 to January 2026 ^[11][22]. C4ADS, which is funded mostly by the U.S. government, says those GPUs sat inside "sprawling multi-vendor contracts" routed through small Chinese regional integrators ^[1][9]. Some of the buying institutions have ties to the CCP and to China's defense and intelligence sectors, according to the report ^[10]. An earlier C4ADS investigation, covering multiple years of government records, put the same channel at $6.48 million ^[12].

The drop-ship route is harder to call, because its cover story is a real process. Most Nvidia silicon is made and packaged at TSMC in Taiwan, and a chip or the accelerator around it may go through several rounds of testing, sometimes more than one trip, before it reaches a customer's data center ^[5]. Vietnam has chip testing facilities, so a Taiwan-to-Vietnam leg has an ordinary explanation ^[14]. A portion of the purportedly tested chips then travelled on to Hong Kong ^[15]. The report leaned on the fields where that explanation runs out: high-value shipments recorded without cost, insurance, weight or freight values, and import values declared as zero ^[17].

The largest category by value is opaque ownership. C4ADS puts $4.6 billion under it and books all of that to one entity, Megaspeed International, the biggest Southeast Asian importer of Nvidia hardware between 2023 and 2025 ^[18][19]. That is about 340 times the $13.4 million the report traced through drop-shipping ^[23]. Megaspeed operates companies in Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia, was bought in 2023 by the Singaporean firm Swiftdata, and before that belonged to the Chinese gaming company 7Road Holdings ^[20]. During the handover its major shareholder was briefly Huang Le, a Chinese businesswoman who is also a director of a Hong Kong company ^[21].

Trade data records a shipment; the beneficial owner sits outside it. C4ADS followed Megaspeed through filings in three countries and still calls the ownership "unresolved" ^[19][20]. The report maps trade patterns and stops short of the liability of the intermediaries that handled the parts.

Which part number is in the box still decides the legality. H100, A100 and Blackwell-family chips cannot be sold to China, while the H20, the H200 and AMD's MI325X move case by case, with a 25% tariff on the latter ^[6]. Beijing's stated policy discourages and restricts purchases of American accelerators in favour of a domestic effort led by Huawei ^[7]. The report counted chips only where its records named them explicitly, so its totals are floors ^[3]. Epoch AI has estimated that around a third of China's AI compute, and possibly most of it, consists of smuggled GPUs ^[4].