> But Megaspeed was never actually sanctioned by the government…

This is irrelevant. There's a blanket ban on physically providing these chips to China; if they knew Megaspeed was diverting chips, it doesn't matter if they were on a list or not, just as you can't trade with North Korea via a new front company. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/04/technology/china-ai-micro...

There's a good chance a future Democratic administration sees the $25M ballroom donations as plain old bribery, too.