A Singapore court has moved the hearings for the three people accused of smuggling Nvidia chips for DeepSeek to August 22, with the prosecution saying it needed more time to review documents and wait for responses from international parties involved in the investigation. According to Reuters, two Singaporean citizens — Woon Guo Jie, 41, and Alan Wei Zhaolun, 49 — alongside 51-year-old Chinese national Li Ming are charged with committing fraud. It was said that they made false representations to suppliers about the final destinations of servers and other equipment they bought in 2023 and 2024.
The trio was arrested earlier this year when Singaporean authorities busted a major smuggling ring that allegedly supplied DeepSeek with banned Nvidia GPUs. This investigation was triggered by the arrival of DeepSeek, an advanced model that rivaled American-made AI LLMs, in late December 2024. The U.S. suspected that the company behind it used AI GPUs illegally acquired through the nation-state, especially after Nvidia reported that Singapore made up 28% of its sales revenue, but only 1% of its deliveries were made in-country.
Chip smuggling has been going on ever since Washington announced its export controls on the most advanced AI GPUs. Tom’s Hardware has reported on several instances of brazen smuggling, with one Chinese businessman even showing off their illicit haul on social media. Because of this, U.S. representatives are demanding answers from both the U.S. Department of Commerce and private companies like Nvidia. On the other hand, the AI giant denies sending GPUs to blacklisted organizations and insists that it has always compliant with export control requirements. Even CEO Jensen Huang says, ‘There is no evidence of AI chip diversion,’ despite numerous reports that say otherwise.
Nevertheless, it’s expected for many companies to have their billing addresses located in Singapore, especially as the island-nation is known to be a business hub in South East Asia. So, even though the payment may originate from Singapore, the ordered goods will not necessarily be delivered there. This makes it harder to track the final destination of controlled items, like these advanced servers — that’s why the U.S. has a proposed bill that will force companies to put tracking tech on high-end gaming and AI GPUs.
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