(Bloomberg) — Singaporean police charged three men for allegedly defrauding an unnamed supplier of computing servers, casting a spotlight on local intermediaries’ role in funneling Nvidia Corp. chips around the world.
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The case centers on whether the trio played a role in misleading the server supplier, including by misrepresenting the actual end-user of the hardware, according to their charge sheets. Two Singaporean men, 41 and 49, were charged for criminal conspiracy to commit fraud, while a Chinese national, 51, was charged for committing a fraud.
The case comes weeks after Bloomberg News reported that the US was investigating whether Chinese artificial intelligence sensation DeepSeek had circumvented US chip sanctions with help of third parties in Singapore. Local media including the broadcaster CNA reported that the arrests were linked to the shipment of Nvidia chips to China.
The police didn’t provide details on the products potentially involved, nor did they name the server computer supplier involved. The Chinese man was charged for making a false representation that a company named Luxuriate Your Life Pte “would be the end-user of the items,” according to his charge sheet.
Such offenses carry a prison sentence of up to 20 years in jail, the police said in a separate statement. The police have also made six other arrests related to its investigation. In total, the police are investigating 22 individuals and companies for suspected involvement in fraud by false representation.
Singapore, which has close trade relations with both the US and China, has been caught in the middle of a tech war between the two superpowers. The Trump administration is probing whether Hangzhou-based DeepSeek bought advanced Nvidia chips through third parties in Singapore, by passing US export restrictions on sales of AI training chips to China.
A senior Singaporean official said last week that Nvidia chips that have been shipped to the country only accounted for less than 1% of the US giant’s revenue, even though the Santa Clara, California-based firm billed more than a fifth of its sales to buyers in the city state.
(Updates with additional arrests in fifth paragraph.)
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