Three charged in Singapore with alleged link to illicit shipments of Nvidia GPUs to China

The authorities in Singapore have charged three men with fraud, allegedly in connection with the shipment of Nvidia GPUs into China in violation of US export controls.

According to local media, nine people were arrested after Singapore police and customs authorities raided 22 locations on Wednesday seizing documentation and electronic records. Two Singaporeans were ultimately detained and charged with criminal conspiracy to commit fraud on a supplier of servers. A third Chinese national was also charged with fraud by false representation.

The alleged crimes essentially boil down to importing systems and saying they're for one company in one part of the world when in fact they'll actually be delivered to another. If these charges stick, the accused face up to 20 years in prison each, a fine, or both.

As Bloomberg reported last week, though Singapore on paper in Nvidia's financial results appears to ship in a lot of chips, GPU shipments into the city state in reality accounted for less than one percent of Nvidia's $35 billion in revenue in the third quarter. On the other hand, $350 million of GPUs a quarter is still a lot. Some suspect a number of these components are ending up in China.

Black and grey market sales of GPUs to the Middle Kingdom have been a major point of concern for US policy makers over the past few years. Efforts to stifle Chinese development have included increasingly restrictive export controls on the sale of accelerators from Nvidia, AMD, and others, as well as limits on sales to nations believed to be "evasion routes" for the indirect import of controlled goods into China.

In 2023, the US began restricting the export of AI infrastructure to many middle-eastern nations for this reason. And, prior to leaving the White House, President Joe Biden's administration moved to limit AI chip sales in most nations. It remains unclear whether the Trump administration will enact these rules or move forward with their own.

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The effectiveness of these controls has been called into question on more than one occasion. However, following the market-shaking release of Chinese AI dev DeepSeek's V3 and R1 models, the US has reportedly ramped up its enforcement efforts and launched an investigation into whether the company may have utilized restricted GPUs to train the model.

Local media reports that customs officials in Singapore are still working to determine whether or not US export controls have been violated.

This isn't the first case of semiconductor smuggling we've come across in recent years, ranging from prosthetic baby bumps with Intel inside or hiding GPUs alongside live lobsters.

Nvidia declined to comment on this story. ®