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IT Iain Thomson Iain Thomson Technology journalist with three decades of experience, including 15 years as a writer and editor for The Register in San Francisco.

“Malaysia and Singapore are importing, I think they're the third and fourth largest importers of GPUs. And I'm sorry, that doesn't ring with either their data center footprint or their likely GPU use. So this looks like a clear case of sanction busting.”

This Week in Tech · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · November 2026

“Malaysia and Singapore are importing, I think they're the third and fourth largest importers of GPUs. And I'm sorry, that doesn't ring with either their data center footprint or their likely GPU use. So this looks like a clear case of sanction busting.” — Iain Thomson, This Week in Tech

Context

The host had just laid out the story of Nvidia's board investigating Jensen Huang's relationship with a woman alleged to be a Chinese intelligence operative, and a Malaysian data center suspected of moving restricted chips. Thomson responds with the import figures, hedged as his recollection.

Transcript

This Week in Tech Around 1:42:56 into the episode
Iain Thomson

…of a Bitwarden Teams or Enterprise Plan, or as always, get started for free across all devices forever as an individual user at bitwarden.com/slash twit. That's bitwarden.com/slash twit. We thank him so much for supporting the whole network. And of course, this week in tech. Now back to the show.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ

…He didn't necessarily disclose any secrets, but this looks extremely, extremely bad. Gentlemen, I want to open this up. That's the background. That's where we are. Ian, I know that you really were hot and heavy about the story. And you too, Alan. What do you got? Where do you want to go with this?

Speaker 3

Well, I've got to say, when I was having a shower before coming on, I was thinking of the fantastic things that could be had. You know, Jensen puts his wang in the wrong place. And unfortunately, someone on Twitter has got two wangs don't make a right. But look, you know, wow. I mean, if you look at the actual stats, coming back to your point, Badre, Malaysia and Singapore are importing, I think they're the third and fourth largest importers of GPUs. And I'm sorry, that doesn't ring with either their data center footprint or their lightly GPU use. So this looks like a clear case of sanction busting. In terms of the technical details of the GPUs, unless Jensen gave his password to this this woman, then I think we're probably safe on that front because he's not going to be getting the detailed GPU documents needed. But, you know, the shock, horror thought that China might be using espionage to get ahead in the chip game is not exactly news. But it's just, it was fascinating that, I mean, literally an hour before we were on air, NVIDIA…

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this, this could be the worst case of sanction busting I've seen. And then we've seen arms transfers. But this, when you've got countries, nation states that are actually in a race to AGI, this kind of looks treasonous. I don't want to say that. It's not treason, but it's bad.…

Speaker 2

A time or two.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ

Yeah, you call him Alan,

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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