Smuggled Nvidia Servers Reached Shanghai Data Center, Bloomberg Says

Twenty-two Dell servers loaded with Nvidia H800 chips — a product Washington banned from sale to China in 2023 — reached a Shanghai data center through a chain of companies tied to Alice Huang, Bloomberg reported on the 13th, citing people familiar with the matter.

Alice Huang, known in Chinese as Huang Le, became a public figure after her affair with former Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang came to light and reports alleged ties to Chinese intelligence. The new report shifts the story from personal scandal to a concrete export-control case.

How did the hardware move?

The route ran through Singapore. Some Nvidia servers were first sold to Aperia Cloud Services, a Singapore-based official Nvidia cloud partner. From there, Bloomberg reports, the hardware was transferred to the Chinese company Alice Huang founded and ended up installed at the Shanghai facility.

The data center itself has several links to Huang. Megaspeed, a Singapore cloud computing firm where she served as an executive, used a rendering of the facility in investor briefing materials in 2024.

Dell confirmed it cut ties early. The company said it "halted all sales and support to Aperia in February of last year over concerns about possible unauthorized diversion." Singaporean authorities arrested Aperia's chief executive that same month on charges of defrauding a server supplier. Nvidia has said Aperia was not an active customer at the time of the arrest.

What do the Chinese filings show?

The servers Aperia bought from Dell also appear in filings by a subsidiary of Shanghai Rongteng Intelligent Computing, a company Alice Huang founded in 2016. Documents submitted to China's central government show the unit pledged 193 servers installed in Shanghai as collateral for a loan in January of last year.

The ownership trail has a family dimension. Alice Huang disposed of her stake in the company in 2017. The Information reported that Huang Yu, who took over that stake, is her younger sister. Huang Yu remained the largest shareholder until January of this year.

The collateral list goes beyond Dell hardware, and the additional numbers widen the scope of the alleged smuggling:

• 22 Dell servers with Nvidia H800 chips, bought by Aperia from Dell
• 52 servers made by U.S.-based Super Micro Computer
• 119 servers made by Taiwan's Gigabyte Technology
• The Super Micro servers reportedly carried Nvidia H100 or H200 chips, both barred from export to China; it has not been confirmed which chips sat inside the Gigabyte machines

What does this change for export enforcement?

Bloomberg's assessment is blunt. The documents "clearly show that a sprawling network of Chinese companies formed around Alice Huang obtained smuggled Nvidia hardware."

That finding matters for three audiences. For U.S. regulators, it illustrates how restricted chips can travel through an authorized partner channel — an official Nvidia cloud partner in Singapore — before landing in China. For Nvidia and Dell, it puts their screening processes under fresh scrutiny, even though both companies say they acted once concerns surfaced. For the data center market, it shows restricted H100 and H200 hardware operating on Chinese soil despite the 2023 ban.

What does this change for Alice Huang personally? The report does not allege a crime by her, and she sold her stake in 2016-2017. But the documented links — the founding role, the sister as largest shareholder, and the Megaspeed briefing — now sit inside a named export-control story rather than a purely personal one.

Neither Alice Huang, Aperia, Megaspeed nor Shanghai Rongteng Intelligent Computing has publicly responded to the specific findings. No charges related to the chip transfers have been reported.