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Start free trial →The AI Policy Podcast · Geopolitics & World Affairs · November 2026
Gorin was describing a wave of Southeast Asian data-center companies that appear to serve mainly Chinese customers. His point is the gap between chips imported and any plausible local demand, the backdrop to the Megaspeed story.
…more reporting after the story came out that Huang Le and some of her business partners from the very beginning have been pitching their company as having an anchor customer, which is Alibaba. Alibaba is a tech giant in China and also makes a very popular series of open weight models known as Quen.
And you were telling us before we started rolling here that you had some personal history with this case from your time in Taiwan.
Yeah, so, you know, for those who don't know, just before I started working here at the Wadwani AI Center, I was a broadcast journalist in Taiwan, where I lived for eight and a half years. And so I covered, you know, the semiconductor industry, lots of NVIDIA stories, and chip smuggling and export controls was another topic that we often covered. And, you know, I'll get back into Jensen in a second because he's really like a national hero in Taiwan. But specifically, you know, I remember covering this MegaSpeed story back in December 25. And yeah, you know, it was one of the sort of big stories kind of grappling with this phenomenon that we were. Seeing where there's a whole range of companies who are being set up right now in Southeast Asia, primarily in Malaysia, who it's pretty clear are focused primarily on serving Chinese customers and possibly involved in smuggling. There's chip data from Epoch AI, for example, that shows that after the United States, China, and the European Union, Malaysia is the largest importer of AI chips now. I find this to be very strange, right? Because I don't know if any of you can name a frontier AI lab from Malaysia or it's not my understanding that Malaysians are particularly high users of AI services. It seems pretty clear that these chips are…
So, Chris, can I clarify here? I think there could be some combination of two things happening, right? You can legally import chips into Malaysia, set up data centers there, and then serve Chinese customers.
You could even do that in the United States.
Is the issue here that we have evidence that we're not seeing data capacity built out, data center capacity built out in Malaysia that represents the amount of chips they're buying? And so the thought is that some percentage of that chips are being smuggled into China for use in country.