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 toReuters, 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 whenSingaporean authorities busted a major smuggling ringthat allegedly supplied DeepSeek with banned Nvidia GPUs. This investigation was triggered bythe arrival of DeepSeek, an advanced model that rivaled American-made AI LLMs, in late December 2024. The U.S. suspected thatthe 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 Hardwarehas reported onseveral instances of brazen smuggling, withone Chinese businessman even showing off their illicit haulon social media. Because of this,U.S. representatives are demanding answersfrom 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. EvenCEO 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 willforce companies to put tracking techon high-end gaming and AI GPUs.
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Jowi Morales is a tech enthusiast with years of experience working in the industry. He’s been writing with several tech publications since 2021, where he’s been interested in tech hardware and consumer electronics.
