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Nvidia Ties Southeast Asian Cloud Partner Status to Chip-Tracking Enrolment, Bloomberg Reports

Nvidia now requires customers in Southeast Asia to enrol in its fleet intelligence system to become official Nvidia Cloud Partners, or NCPs, according to people familiar with the matter cited by Bloomberg. The requirement links partner stat

AI.info Team · Written with AI · fact-checked · 2026-11-06

Nvidia links Southeast Asian NCP status to a voluntary tracking programme

Nvidia now requires customers in the region to enrol in its fleet intelligence system, according to people familiar with the matter cited by Bloomberg; Nvidia declined to comment. The enrolment is required to become an official Nvidia Cloud Partner, or NCP. The designation grants AI cloud computing providers a public stamp of approval and preferred chip access.

People familiar with the confidential new measure say Nvidia is using the NCP label to encourage broader uptake of a chip-tracking programme that remains voluntary. The move could provide Nvidia with more visibility into how its hardware moves through a region that has long been a transshipment point for restricted goods.

Fleet intelligence gathers geolocation information for individual Nvidia parts

Nvidia first debuted fleet intelligence nearly a year ago, after the US began prosecuting alleged chip smugglers and suspicions about Megaspeed became public. The tool collects a range of information about Nvidia hardware deployments that is useful for data-centre operators. It also gathers geolocation information for individual parts, doubling as a response to US concerns about diversion.

Participants do not have to share location data with Nvidia or the US government by default. An Nvidia spokesperson previously told Bloomberg that, should Washington regulators want information from the database, they would communicate directly with users.

Nvidia and US authorities spar over responsibility for stopping chip smuggling

The US government broadly prohibits Chinese companies from purchasing advanced Nvidia AI chips without a licence. US authorities believe Chinese companies have nevertheless obtained billions of dollars’ worth of the hardware, primarily through smuggling networks in Southeast Asia.

Nvidia and some US authorities have sparred over responsibility for solving the problem. Some in Washington are frustrated that the chipmaker has repeatedly missed red flags, while Nvidia has said it follows laws as written, putting the onus on government officials to identify bad actors.

Megaspeed has been under US and Singapore investigation for more than a year

The New York Times reported last week that Washington suspects one of the company’s top executives of spying for Beijing, leveraging her close relationship with Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang.

Huang said last week, referring to graphics processing units, “we’ve studied all their deployments of our GPUs and counted every one”. Nvidia said last year that it had identified “substantially” all the products sent to Megaspeed, after getting pressed about discrepancies in the company’s data-centre footprint. Megaspeed won the NCP label within a week of its 2023 creation.

Nvidia takes steps to limit Chinese companies’ access to its hardware

In the wake of the biggest chip-smuggling indictment in the US, Nvidia earlier this year removed half of the Asian firms it had pre-approved for chip purchases. More recently, the company began telling buyers not to rent more than half of their Nvidia computing power to Chinese companies, although Washington generally allows Chinese firms to use accelerators owned by others overseas.

“Longstanding US policy encourages every cloud to build on American infrastructure and to win business everywhere they can,” an Nvidia spokesperson told The Financial Times.