China’s lack of concern about the US’s position in technology, particularly with Nvidia processors, has raised suspicions. It appears there is a medium ground. Who? Singapore.Â
According to reports, three men were charged with stealing from an unknown supplier of computer servers. This has shed light on the role of local intermediates in the global distribution of Nvidia Corp. chips.
According to their charge sheets, the case revolves around whether the trio was involved in misleading the server provider, including misrepresenting the true end user of the hardware. Two Singaporean men, aged 41 and 49, were charged with criminal conspiracy to commit fraud, while a Chinese man, 51, was charged with fraud.
Three Men Charged in Fraud Investigation Of Nvidia's Servers In Singapore
-22 locations raided.
-Nearly two dozen people and companies being investigated.
-Documents and electronics seized.
-Nine arrests.
-Three people face fraud charges and up to 20 years in prison if… pic.twitter.com/iSXh38YTKX— kristen shaughnessy (@kshaughnessy2) February 28, 2025
The police did not disclose information about the potentially linked products or name the server computer supplier. The Chinese man was charged with making a false claim that a company called Luxuriate Your Life Pte would be the end-user of the items.
The police say that doing something like that could get you up to 20 years in jail. In line with the investigation, six more people have been arrested. 22 people and businesses are being looked into by the cops for fraud by false representation.
DeepSeek is a suspect of using middlemen to obtain US chips
There have been reports that the US was looking into whether Chinese AI sensation DeepSeek had crossed US chip sanctions with the assistance of third parties in Singapore. Local media said that the arrests were related to the shipment of Nvidia chips to China.
The Trump administration is looking into whether DeepSeek, based in Hangzhou, got advanced Nvidia chips through third parties in Singapore. Why? The US doesn’t allow the export of AI training chips to China. A top Singaporean official said last week that Nvidia chips sent to the country made up less than 1% of the US company’s income.
After DeepSeek’s slow market sentiments, the company’s development team said they used 2,000 Nvidia H800 GPUs, a less advanced chip made to meet US export rules, and spent $5.6 million to train V3, R1’s basic model.
The Silicon Valley giant doubted. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said that training its chatbot GPT-4 cost more than $100 million. In fact, analysts think that the model used as many as 25,000 more advanced H100 GPUs.
Scale AI’s CEO, Alexandr Wang, also said that DeepSeek’s story didn’t make sense. He said that it was his understanding that DeepSeek had access to 50,000 more powerful H100 chips but couldn’t talk about them because of US export rules. Musk also supported the critics that DeepSeek couldn’t have used that less funds.
AI has always had one issue: it requires a lot of funds to do a project. As much as the noise around DeepSeek has cooled off, people are still digging to find out how the AI startup is managed.
Singapore caught in the middle of China and the US trade war
The two greatest nations economically have been on tariff threat. Whether it’s under Biden or under Trump, China has always been an enemy of the US.Â
However, under Trump, it has intensified. China put tariffs on several US goods and tried to shake the biggest US tech company by saying it would look into Google. This happened just minutes after US President Donald Trump put a 10% tax on goods from Beijing.
Singapore is in a tough spot regarding culture, the economy, and strategy. Although most of the people in the former British settlement speak English, about 75% are Chinese.
The US has strong business and security ties with Singapore, which includes access to the cities’ military and air bases. Singapore is a Major Security Cooperation Partner of the US. In 2024, the trade of goods and services between them was worth $132 billion, or $98 billion.
However, Singapore’s biggest business partner is China. Last year, trade between the two countries was worth more than S$170 billion, and the city-state also invests heavily in China.
Also, the city-state’s trade balance hit a new high. This is because many Chinese business owners moved their operations from the mainland and Hong Kong to Singapore, looking for a neutral zone to run their companies. But it takes a lot of balance to walk the tightrope between two giants that are fighting each other.
A report at the end of January said that US officials were investigating whether China’s game-changing AI startup DeepSeek obtained advanced Nvidia semiconductors through third parties in Singapore to circumvent US restrictions. This gave the city a scare, and Singapore and Nvidia moved quickly to comfort the US government.
According to the government, US rules hadn’t been broken, and there was no reason to believe that DeepSeek obtained any export-controlled products from Singapore. The case showed how quickly trade-dependent nations can be dragged into the US-China dispute. Now, with this new development, Singapore needs to really watch out lest it lose one of the countries or even both.
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