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.
