The dismissal of Huang from the position of NVIDIA CEO disrupted Chinese purchases of H100 and H200 AI accelerators for Russia

The exposure of former NVIDIA head Jensen Huang's connections with a suspected Chinese spy and his resignation on November 12 caused disruptions in the illegal supply chains of sanctioned chips to the Russian Federation. Chinese intermediaries are panic-buying H100 and H200 accelerators in the US for Russian customers, while the company's fresh processors are meanwhile being found en masse in Russian drones shot down in Ukraine.

This is stated in an investigation by the American technology publication and YouTube channel Gamers Nexus.

Journalists gained access to exclusive correspondence between a Chinese factory and an American IT company. The request came on the very day of publication of news about Jensen Huang's extramarital affair with Chinese citizen Alice Huang — the head of the Singaporean intermediary firm Megaspeed, which US intelligence agencies suspect of working for Chinese intelligence and helping to circumvent export controls.

In the message, representatives of the plant from China were urgently looking for suppliers of NVIDIA H100 and H200 computing accelerators. They directly stated that the end buyers are clients from russia, since all used goods on the domestic Chinese market had already been bought up. A Gamers Nexus insider suggested that the publicity around Huang and the investigation against Megaspeed had shut down the illegal supply channel.

“I’m really curious how much this Jensen story cut off their access,” the publication’s source said.

The American company refused the deal, emphasizing criminal liability. "We will be arrested and put in prison if we sell this to you," the company responded. The journalists' interlocutor explained that despite the Donald Trump administration's permission to sell H200 to China on the condition of paying 25% of the profit to the US budget, knowingly re-exporting these chips to the Russian Federation for use in the war is equated to treason in the US.

Investigators note that russia is one of the final destinations in a complex chip smuggling scheme. It operates through a "matryoshka" of shell companies in Singapore, Malaysia, the Cayman Islands, and the British Virgin Islands, from where the equipment reaches China and is then re-exported to the russian federation — presumably for russian data centers and military systems. NVIDIA ignored journalists' requests regarding the russian trail in supply chains.

Meanwhile, journalists from Gamers Nexus received a whole bucket of components from downed Russian drones from the front line in Ukraine. Among them, they found NVIDIA AI Edge Jetson processors, in particular the relatively new model TE980M-A1 (Tegra architecture), released in 2023 — already after the introduction of American sanctions. According to the investigators, these chips are widely used in Zala Z20 and Z16 reconnaissance UAVs, Lancet loitering munitions, as well as in Russian missile weapons.

Let us recall that on November 12, 2026, NVIDIA founder Jensen Huang left the position of CEO after 33 years of leading the company amid a scandal surrounding his ties with Megaspeed head Alice Huang and the exposure of an office romance with a subordinate female top manager. CFO Colette Kress became the interim CEO.

Previously, NVIDIA's management repeatedly denied the facts of smuggling of its chips, claiming that it controls every accelerator, although Ukrainian defense intelligence has repeatedly reported the discovery of NVIDIA Jetson chips in Russian drones and missiles.