David McCloskey
Sunday Times bestselling spy novelist and former CIA analyst who wrote for the President's Daily Brief and served on field rotations across the Middle East.
“The chips never have to cross the border into China in this scenario. You can just use the data centers in Malaysia or in Singapore or Indonesia, and Chinese companies can take advantage of the computing power that NVIDIA's chips give them. So it's effectively a workaround. … Megaspeed is essentially an intermediary in this chain that allows China to get access to the computing power of NVIDIA's chips.”
The Rest Is Classified · Geopolitics & World Affairs · November 2026
Context
Co-host Gordon Corera had just explained that US export limits bar the most advanced chips from China but not from Southeast Asian data centers. McCloskey, a former CIA analyst, says the romantic angle has dominated headlines but the bigger story is this chip-access pipeline.
Transcript
They do, effectively. Now, how they used it, if they used it, still unclear. But the point is, is that Chinese intelligence had this guy over a barrel.
…be sold into China, but you can sell them into Singapore, Malaysia, and other countries around China, build data centers there, and then rent the computing power to Chinese companies to use. And that looks like what Megaspeed was effectively doing, which gave it this close relationship with Jensen.
…And I mean, this is the fascinating bit about this operation is because the headlines over the last week have very much focused on the kind of the romantic relationship, the fact that Alice Wong is an MSS asset and she's in this, you know, in this relationship with Jensen. But under the surface is potentially even the bigger story, which is that, or it's a different layer to the story, because Megaspeed is essentially an intermediary in this chain that allows China to get access to the computing power of NVIDIA's chips. And it does so through all this kind of shadowy chain of, in some cases, very clearly kind of cut out front companies that may not have any actual physical presence and that they're using as a way to import these kind of chips into East Asia and eventually to let the Chinese use the compute. But what I find to be really kind of fascinating about this is that the Alice Wang thing is like a human…
And are we clear whether that kind of shadowy network, the kind of supplier network, the front companies, how closely allied they are to the MSS? We don't really know whether they're kind of real companies which then get leveraged by the MSS or if they're kind of front companies. It's not entirely…
Yeah, that is another important point: that the fact that we're having this conversation is not because U.S. intelligence was looking at Jensen Huang or NVIDIA. What seems to be the case from the New York Times and the FT reporting is that the starting point for the surveillance on Alice Wong was…
Now, it's interesting, isn't it? Because, you know, let's say this is the NSA National Security Agency, which is doing signal intercepts. Almost certainly is. Almost certainly is. It's looking at Alice Wang and looking at Megaspeed. And then they see that there's an American citizen in the mix…
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