By Ana Swanson, Aaron Krolik & Paul Mozur
In Malaysia’s lush southern peninsula, a data center known as A201 is set to open next year, packed with hundreds of
millions of dollars in Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) servers.
The data center plans to supply this computing power to a Chinese tech giant. The setup is legal and profitable. It will also sidestep United States (US) rules that ban sales of the most advanced AI chips directly to Chinese firms.
The firm operating the data centre is a client of Cantor Fitzgerald, the financial services firm formerly led by Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, who handed off leadership of it to his sons. Lutnick is now writing the rules that would have a substantial effect on the data center’s business.
Lutnick has been seen as a force slowing rules that would clamp down on the sale of Nvidia chips to data centers like A201, which sit outside China but provide AI computing power to Chinese firms.
The Trump administration, concerned about ceding the country’s advantage in AI, bans the sale of cutting-edge chips to China. But it has been embroiled in an internal debate for much of the past two years over how far to go in limiting chip sales to data centers in Southeast Asia. On one side of the debate are China hawks, who see the data centres as a way for Beijing to do an end run around the chip sales ban. On the other are officials, most prominently Lutnick, who are pushing against going too far in limiting the ability of US companies like Nvidia to sell their products in Asia.
Recently, Lutnick has been advocating a less stringent version of those controls under consideration, which could cut back on Nvidia’s business by giving the US government more oversight of chip sales to international data centres.
Cantor Fitzgerald has had business dealings with several data centre firms in Southeast Asia that cater to Chinese clients, and could be affected by the regulations Lutnick is drafting, a review by The New York Times has found.
Cantor Fitzgerald served as a designated sales agent for an equity offering of up to $1 billion this year by Bitdeer, the Singaporean firm that will operate data center A201, in addition to having other financial ties to various global data center businesses. The relationship between the two companies began as early as 2024, when Cantor Fitzgerald helped Bitdeer arrange a stock offering of up to $250 million.
