Singapore Police Force have charged three men with fraud in a case involving allegedly illegal re-export of Nvidia GPUs to Chinese AI company DeepSeek, bypassing U.S. trade restrictions, reports ChannelNewsAsia. The police and customs authorities raided 22 locations, arrested nine individuals, and seized documents and electronic records, reports Reuters.
When Singapore suddenly became Nvidia's second largest geographical source of revenue in 2024, many suspected that this happened because Nvidia's GPUs were illegally re-exported from Singapore to China. Nvidia denied all accusations saying that billing locations do not represent actual destination of GPUs. Still, the U.S. Commerce Department started investigation whether DeepSeek has acquired restricted American GPUs to train its AI models.
