Nvidia’s board has opened an independent investigation into Jensen Huang after the CEO admitted in a staff memo to an affair with Alice Huang, an executive at Singapore-based Megaspeed. A memo circulated among US policymakers earlier this year claimed China’s Ministry of State Security had recruited her to spy on him. Beijing’s embassy in Washington has dismissed the allegations, and no one has been charged.
The board said it has no reason to believe national security or company secrets were compromised, and that it retains confidence in Huang. Independent directors will run the probe with outside legal counsel.
The Singapore angle is what the region should watch. Megaspeed, a cloud company that grew out of a Chinese gaming business, became Nvidia’s largest buyer in Southeast Asia, purchasing roughly US$2 billion worth of chips, according to The New York Times. That reporting raised questions over whether the chips reached Chinese users in breach of US export rules, claims Nvidia says it investigated and debunked.
The timing could hardly be worse. Nvidia reports earnings on 17 November, and three House committee chairs want Huang at a closed-door briefing a day later. For Southeast Asia’s data centre and AI infrastructure players, who rely on steady access to Nvidia hardware, any tightening of export scrutiny would land close to home.
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REGIONAL
Thailand files criminal complaint against Bitget, moves to block it: The SEC alleges operator BG Limited served Thai users without a licence from 2022 to 2025, and wants access cut from December 5. The case clouds Bitget’s bid to buy licensed exchange GMO-Z.com.
A quarter of Filipino workers use AI agents, but only 15% of firms do: Gobi Partners puts worker adoption above the 16% global average, yet AI startups took under 1% of 2026 deal value. IBPAP has cut its 2028 headcount target from 2.5M to a best-case 2.14M.
Equinix opens US$290M SG6 data centre in Singapore for AI workloads: The first phase adds about 1,550 cabinets and scales to 20MW of IT load. SG6 is Equinix’s first site approved under Singapore’s Data Centre Call for Applicationframework, which rations new capacity by efficiency and economic value.
Chocolate Finance takes its cash management app to Hong Kong: The Singapore fintech, which manages over US$1.25 billion for more than 130,000 users, offers a 3.8% annual return on the first US$12,800 deposited and will cover any shortfall until June 2027.
U Mobile opens 5G-A sandbox to Cradle startups, minus the cheques: Malaysia’s second 5G operator brings test kit, engineers and enterprise introductions, but no guaranteed funding or contracts. The real test is whether pilots turn into paid deals as Singtel writes bigger cheques.
Shopee says Singapore affiliate sales grew nearly 50% in a year: Its local affiliate network now exceeds 300,000, and creator content drives one in 10 platform visits. The figures are unaudited, and Shopee disclosed no merchandise value ahead of its 11.11 campaign.
INTERVIEWS & FEATURES
Gobi pitches one-person AI firms to fill Philippines’ Series A gap: Philippine Series A value has fallen 98% this year. Gobi argues AI-native solo founders can validate ideas on US$5,000 to US$20,000, though 86% of the country’s 8,640 one-person corporations remain traditional service businesses.
Yale’s Sonnenfeld puts Jensen Huang’s survival odds at 50-50: Nvidia has no obvious successor and no dual-class shares shielding its founder. Its role as AI’s chief financier, with stakes in OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI, means a leadership crisis could ripple across the industry.
Data centre backlash and Musk’s losses top tech’s midterm hangover: TechCrunch’s Equity team notes voters approved most data centre restrictionson local ballots, while Musk’s half-billion-dollar Republican spend bought little. OpenAI has already dropped NDA demands and rebranded sites as compute campuses.
INTERNATIONAL
South Korea fines Coupang US$220M over food delivery dominance: The Korea Fair Trade Commission says Coupang required merchants to match termsoffered on rival platforms and penalised those who refused, curbing their pricing freedom and hampering rivals such as leader Baedal Minjok.
India’s NPCI launches AI and blockchain technology subsidiary: NPCI Tech Solutions, led by former CTO Vishal Kanvaty, is the UPI operator’s fourth wholly owned unit. It will build digital public infrastructure services such as eKYC Setu; budget and revenue targets remain undisclosed.
Tesla to end Cybertruck production in 2027 to build more Cybercabs: Musk once forecast 250,000 annual sales; Tesla has sold only tens of thousands in three years. It is the third model Tesla has axed, after the Model S and X, as it pivots to robotaxis and robots.
SNL’s new Elon Musk impression lands after a rough week for Musk: Jeremy Culhane plays Musk as desperate to be liked after his half-billion-dollar midterm bet flopped and the Cybertruck’s demise. SNL has also skewered Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and data centre backer Kevin O’Leary this season.
CYBERSECURITY
Fake Wi-Fi and a bogus security workshop drained traders at TOKEN2049: ‘Evil Twin’ hotspots and a side event that pushed remote-control malware let attackers empty hot wallets in Singapore, including over US$4M from trader Frogman. The writer urges eSIMs, VPNs and cold storage.
Intrusion at SoftBank’s IDC Frontier hit 495 cloud customers: SoftBank Corp. says attackers took no data from customers’ virtual servers in the October 7 incident, which hit corporate and local government users. It still lifted its FY2026 revenue forecast to US$49.9B.
Binance CFO Kaiser Ng exits a week after US$6.3B North Korean hack: The FBI blamed North Korea’s TraderTraitor group for the breach. Once accounts unfroze, users pulled a net US$3.6 billion within hours. Justin Yek takes over, and Binance says it will absorb all losses.
SEMICONDUCTOR
Nvidia, SK Telecom bring Korean startup Rebellions into sovereign AI: Rebellions’ R200 chips will plug into Nvidia’s NVLink Fusion and MGX racks, handling decode while Nvidia GPUs run prefill. Seoul backs the project, but the systems will only be ready for deployment in 2028.
Analog Devices closes US$1.35B buy of edge-AI chipmaker Alif: The deal brings Alif’s low-power AI microcontrollers and its Singapore and Bengaluru engineering teams into ADI. ADI has not said how those teams will be integrated or whether US$200 million in contingent payments were triggered.
US memo claims Megaspeed exec was recruited to spy on Nvidia’s CEO: Separately, The New York Times found New Matrix, a Chinese firm cleared to buy Nvidia chips, listed an office that was an empty shell, raising fears it fronts a blacklisted private equity firm.
AI
OpenAI reportedly raises US$11B at a US$1.25 trillion valuation: The round could reach about US$20 billion, far below September’s US$30B goal. Potential buyers of Anthropic’s IPO shares are also eyeing a lower valuation as midterm results rattle AI stocks.
Ramp data shows enterprise AI spending stalling as token use climbs: Token spend grew just 1.5% across August and September, against 42% in July, as price cuts and tighter budgets bite. Ramp’s economist says the hypergrowth era may be over just as Anthropic prepares to list.
UBTech, Tianyi Telecom aim to push home robots past 1M units: The Shenzhen robotics maker signed the strategic pact with Tianyi Telecom Terminals on November 9, also setting 100,000-unit milestones for highly biomimetic and wheeled humanoid robots. The targets cover the wider industry, not just their own shipments.
THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
SEA healthtech funding fell 85% in two years. AI hasn’t rescued it: Funding dropped from US$397M in 2023 to US$59.7M in 2025. The author argues founders must prove paying customers, measurable value and repeatable deployments, because unpaid hospital pilots are not product-market fit.
Why SEA healthtech struggles for funding despite the AI boom: Regional healthtech funding fell from US$397 million in 2023 to US$59.7 million in 2025. The author argues founders must prove paying customers, repeatable deployments and measurable value, not just impressive AI demos.
The Indonesian tax traps foreign startups underestimate: New PTs lost access to the 0.5% turnover tax in April 2026. The author flags permanent establishment risk from sales-closing local hires, 20% withholding without treaty paperwork, and low transfer pricing thresholds.
One input window is replacing dashboards, but code must check AI: Lobby founder Serge Berezhnoy runs operations through an agent on a Linux server. After a model pitched a cat-meme creator as a beauty influencer, his team moved validation into deterministic code.
AI became my extra team member, but it still needs managing: The Wellness Insider founder Melissa Fann uses AI for first drafts, campaign plans and sponsorship pitches. Her verdict: vague instructions produce vague results, and responsibility for errors still sits with her.
Founders stuck on ‘almost’ are deferring a loss, not stalling: Priyanka Raina argues indecision shields founders from closing off possible futures. Rather than listing obstacles, she has clients picture the decided state vividly until the pull of that future outweighs the fear.
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