🕵️ How Banned Chips Got To China

Supercharge your productivity with HubSpot's comprehensive guide to Chat GPT. This free resource is your fast track to AI mastery:

Plus, in-depth sections on email composition, content creation, customer support, and data analysis.

Get The Free Guide

Banned Nvidia chips just turned up in Shanghai.

And the paper trail leads to a company founded by Alice Huang, the alleged Chinese spy reported to have had an affair with former Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

Bloomberg pieced it together from documents it reviewed. Grab a coffee. This one has more plot than a Netflix thriller.

It all starts in Singapore. Aperia Cloud Services, an official Nvidia Cloud Partner, bought 22 Dell servers packed with Nvidia H800 chips.

The catch? The US banned exporting H800s to China in 2023.

According to Bloomberg's source and documents, some of those servers ended up with Shanghai Longteng Intelligent Computing, a company Alice founded a decade ago.

They were installed at the Yangtze River Delta Project, a Shanghai data center.

The plot thickens. Megaspeed, which Alice founded in 2023, used a rendering of that same data center in a 2024 investor presentation.

Bold choice for a slide deck.

It gets better: Longteng pledged 193 servers as collateral for financing in Jan 2025. Basically a pawn shop, except the watch is restricted AI hardware.

That stash included the Dell hardware, plus 52 Super Micro units with Nvidia H100 or H200 chips. Both are banned from sale to China without a US license.

How did Longteng get its hands on all this? The filings don't say. Convenient.

Alice gave up her Longteng shares in 2017. The new owner was Huang Yu, identified by The Information as Alice's sister.

Huang Yu stayed majority owner until Jan 2026, so she was running the firm when those servers got pledged.

So somehow, everyone followed the rules…. but the chips made it to Shanghai anyway.

Export controls are only as strong as the sketchiest reseller. Chips get sold to a legit-looking partner in a third country, and later they turn up somewhere they're banned.

For Nvidia $NVDA ( ▼ 2.01% ), Dell $DELL ( ▼ 7.18% ) and Super Micro $SMCI ( ▼ 0.46% ), the immediate damage is mostly reputational. The bigger question is what Washington does next.

Stories like this give regulators a reason to tighten the rules on who chipmakers can sell to, and through which middlemen.

For a sector where Asia is a big chunk of demand, stricter checks on resellers could mean more friction and slower sales. Expect more stories like this, not fewer.

AI chips might be the most wanted product on the planet. Clearly they're also some of the hardest to keep track of.

There's one stock sitting in nearly every index fund in America, and starting in January it's squarely in the new Congress's sights. It's one of three names we spell out in The Blue Wave Playbook, with 7 stocks to own. Normally $19.99. Today it's free.

See 3 stocks to avoid

Europe is paying 10x more for gas than America.

Same fuel. Same winter. Wildly different bill.

US buyers pay around $3 per MMBtu (the standard unit for gas). In Europe and Asia it's a little over $30.

Imagine paying £30 for a pint while your mate across the pond pays £3.

The Iran war is behind the pain in Europe and Asia. America is shrugging it off thanks to shale.

Thanks to the shale boom, US gas production has more than doubled in 20 years.

Ben Marshall, CEO of Vitol Americas, says US supply is about as close to "infinite" as you can imagine at roughly $3-$3.50.

Push the price up 50 cents and drillers flood the market with more. Winter storms will cause spikes, but over a full year he sees no shortage.

The savings are huge. An NBER working paper found US gas buyers saved $3.1T-$4.3T between 2007 and 2025 compared with buyers in Europe and Japan.

That's $164B-$227B a year. Or roughly $450M-$620M every single day.

And America is selling off the surplus. US LNG exports averaged 17.4 Bcf/d in H1 2026, up 23% year on year.

The EIA expects 17.3 Bcf/d in H2, then 18.7 Bcf/d in H1 '27. The tap keeps opening.

Disruption in the Strait of Hormuz knocked out around one-fifth of global LNG supply, mostly from Qatar.

Asia buys ~80% of Qatar's LNG. So Asian buyers suddenly had to fight over spot cargoes like it's the last turkey on Christmas Eve.

The result: US LNG shipments to Asia doubled in H1 '26 compared with last year.

Europe was already exposed. After Ukraine, it swapped Russian pipeline gas for LNG shipped by sea. So Europe now shops in the same spot market as Asia.

Two hungry buyers. One shrinking buffet.

Here's the scary bit. Europe's gas storage is only ~72% full as of Nov 9. The 2022-25 average was 90%.

Rystad Energy says Europe goes into winter with its lowest inventory of the 2020s. It warns the continent will "have to pay dearly" and hope for a mild winter.

Europe's energy plan is now partly a weather forecast.

What it means for you:

Every plane in America just got told to sit down.

Late Friday afternoon, the FAA ordered a ground stop for departing flights at every airport in the U.S.

And this almost never happens. It's only the third nationwide ground stop in U.S. history.

Three times. Ever.

The order came from the FAA's command center: all departing traffic stays grounded "until further notice."

The official reason? "Extraordinary circumstances" and "reasons of safety."

Something broke, and nobody wanted to find out what it was at 35,000 feet.

What about flights already heading here from abroad? Inbound international traffic is being handled case by case.

If you were somewhere over the Atlantic, congrats. You're now a line item on someone's very stressful spreadsheet.

So what grounded a whole country's worth of planes?

At 5:05pm ET, the FAA posted on X that the issue stems from "a temporary telecommunications outage."

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy added the part that makes this a big deal: the glitch hit all Air Route Traffic Control Centers.

Those are the centers that guide planes between airports. When they can't talk to anyone, nothing takes off.

Duffy says FAA technicians are investigating and the DOT will share updates as soon as it has any.

The world's most important aviation system, taken out by a connection problem. Everyone who has ever frozen mid-sentence on a Zoom call feels seen.

Right now, it’s not clear how long this lasts. Duration is the whole story here.

It also landed on a Friday, when half the country is trying to get somewhere. Brilliant timing as always.

Bottom line: one phone line went down and the entire U.S. sky went quiet.

HubSpot's CRM is so smart, it now updates itself. Calls get logged and summarized the moment they end. New leads get researched and a first outreach drafted, automatically. Deals move forward on their own, with next steps flagged before you have to ask. 

Even the one repetitive task you've been meaning to fix can now run itself, no code required. Customers using it are already seeing the difference. 

This isn't the CRM you have to work hard to figure out. It's the one already working before you log in.

Get a Demo