Nvidia is expected to have an export compliance program to verify that their products are going where they were intended to go.

That would be a much more convincing argument if he didn't have an affair with an executive there who is also a spy. My guess is he did know, the board knows he knows. At least. Helping facilitate the smuggling wouldn't be totally crazy either given these circumstances and his public positions.

> What do you expect Nvidia to do, post armed guards in Asia to make sure the GPUs don't move around?

Yes. Some companies that deal in export restricted items will have entire teams of US citizens that regularly do inventory checks in foreign customers facilities. If a single item is missing and it can't be located within 24 hours they pack everything up and put it on a cargo plane back to the US.

It is a trivial amount of money when you are talking about $100m+ deals.

For real. And if the US government assumed MegaSpeed's executive was a Chinese spy for the past year, then why didn't they do anything to stop this or add MegaSpeed to export controls? The whole thing wreaks.

Believe it or not, companies are legally required to do due diligence on such things. For example, I work for a huge bank and when there's even the faintest hint of money possibly being funneled through an intermediary to a sanctioned state/person or a company on the Entities List they will absolutely send someone to investigate. Physically, if it is deemed necessary.

A multi-billion dollar deal in Singapore would absolutely require some folks to physically go out there and do some inventory at the very least. It needs to be in the realm of, "We walked the data center and counted how many of our products were installed and we were shown their yet-installed inventory" documentation. "It matches what we sold them." A great big, fancy report. With pictures.

How much would that cost? Basically nothing compared to how much trouble they could get in for not doing that due diligence. Compare how much it would've cost against how much their stock just dropped.

> What do you expect Nvidia to do, post armed guards in Asia to make sure the GPUs don't move around?

I expect them to follow the law, which, in this case, appears to be a bit more complex than "you can't sell to china but it's okay if you sell to someone else who sells to china."

Not to mention the fact that he was sleeping with the Megaspeed exec makes it all extremely suspicious.

You think maybe schtupping the CEO of said company might impact his willingness or ability to do due diligence?

There’s a thing called know you customer (KYC) law. You can in fact be held liable if you can’t prove you sufficiently vetted a customer before engaging in a transaction with them. Saying that you’re right there’s only so much they can do after vetting.