SINGAPORE: Authorities in Singapore said on Monday (March 3) that the servers connected to a fraud case the police have been investigating recently might have contained artificial intelligence chips from Nvidia, which were then sent to Malaysia.
However, whether Malaysia was the final destination is still unknown. These chips had been embedded in servers from Supermicro and Dell and allegedly supplied to companies based in Singapore before being sent to Malaysia.
On Feb 27, three men were charged with fraud following a joint enforcement operation by the Singapore Police Force and Singapore Customs the previous day, when police raided 22 locations and seized documentary and electronic records. This resulted in the arrest of nine individuals. The charges against the three men were reportedly connected to a case linked to Nvidia, although this was not mentioned in the police statement on the arrests.
The United States has been looking into whether the Chinese AI company DeepSeek had used chips that were allowed to be shipped to China. The men who were charged may have been involved in the movement of Nvidia’s chips to China.
Authorities said they had received an anonymous tip-off concerning the three men, which prompted a probe into their activities. These investigations revealed potential breaches of Singapore’s laws, which spurred law enforcement action, said the Minister for Law and Home Affairs.
The investigations were carried out independently by Singaporean authorities and not at the request of the US or another country, contrary to speculation. Singapore has, additionally, asked Malaysia and the United States to share relevant information that would aid in investigations.
CNA quoted the Law and Home Affairs Minister as saying that Singapore has told the United States that if the servers contained US export-controlled items, Singapore would ‘be happy to work with them and support any investigations in the US on that”.
He also said that it is unlikely that Singapore is the sole transit point for similar shipments.
In January, DeepSeek disrupted the world of AI when it introduced a free assistant that claimed to use less data and was significantly less expensive than AI technology developed in the US. The US announced shortly afterwards that it would look into whether the technology used by DeepSeek also utilised restricted AI chips.
A Bloomberg report citing people familiar with the matter said that the US was investigating if the Chinese AI startup had bought semiconductors from tech giant Nvidia through third parties in Singapore to bypass restrictions. /TISG
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