Three People Allegedly Linked To Shipping NVIDIA’s AI GPUs To China Charged By Singapore Police
Following reports of China’s DeepSeek purportedly accessing NVIDIA’s GPUs to train its artificial intelligence models from Singapore, authorities in the island nation have charged three men with fraud in connection with false representations related to product end use. DeepSeek’s purported ability to significantly reduce AI training costs led to a massive stock market bloodbath in January after NVIDIA’s shares lost nearly $600 billion in market value during a single day. A closer look at the firm’s annual filings with the SEC revealed that a large portion of its revenue had come from Singapore, which led to speculation of chips from the country making it to China.
Singapore Police Arrest Nine Individuals In Connection With Customs Law
According to the CNA, Singapore police and customs authorities arrested nine people in raids on Thursday. They also charged three people in connection with misrepresenting the end destination of products, reports the publication.
After NVIDIA’s SEC annual filings revealed last month that 22% of the firm’s billings were to Singapore, the firm released a statement sharing that DeepSeek’s breakthroughs were through Time Test Scaling. This technique, explained NVIDIA, was “leveraging widely-available models and compute that is fully export control compliant.”
The CNA’s report shares that two of the three people charged in connection with a conspiracy to commit fraud on a server supplier are Singaporean nationals. The third is a Chinese national who is charged with committing fraud through false representation.
The two Singaporeans were charged with shipping products to entities other than the “authorised ultimate consignee of end users” as they had outlined in their representations. The Chinese national has been charged with falsely representing that the products would be shipped to a company called Luxuriate Your Life.
False representation is a serious crime in Singapore and can see those found guilty sentenced to a whopping 20 years in jail. After reports of NVIDIA’s chips purportedly shipping to China via Singapore emerged, others claimed that the US government was investigating whether the GPUs were making their way to China via the island country.
NVIDIA is prevented by US export control restrictions to ship most of its AI GPUs to China. The firm’s shares dropped by a whopping 8% during trading today after market worries about the US government tightening its sanctions to prevent it from selling any chips to China.
The firm’s CEO Jensen Huang has asserted that AI models now need 100 times more computing power than older models due to improvements in reasoning technologies. As a result, NVIDIA is attempting to convince the Trump administration that any older chips that it sells to China will be unable to allow the country to surpass the US in AI capabilities.
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Three People Allegedly Linked To Shipping NVIDIA’s AI GPUs To China Charged By Singapore Police, source
