Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Singapore has charged three men in a case suspected to involve Nvidia semiconductor sales that potentially breach US export controls, the government announced on Monday.
The two Singaporeans and one Chinese national were charged last Thursday with fraud, after the government received a tip-off that servers containing the chips were being exported to Malaysia.
“We assess that the servers may contain Nvidia chips,” home affairs minister K Shanmugam told a press briefing.
“We will not tolerate individuals and companies violating our laws or taking advantage of their association with Singapore to circumvent export controls of other countries,” he added.
Singapore’s role in the global supply chain of semiconductors has come under scrutiny in recent weeks, with US politicians raising questions about the potential leakage of restricted chips into China.
Nvidia generated nearly a quarter of its sales through its Singapore office in the third quarter of 2024, making it the second-largest market after the US. But the company has said that almost all of this is invoicing other international companies through Singapore, with very few chips actually passing through the city-state.
The fraud case relates to the sale of Dell and Supermicro servers imported from the US and then sold to a company in Malaysia.
“The question is whether Malaysia was a final destination or from Malaysia it went to somewhere else, which we do not know for certain at this point,” said Shanmugam, adding that the Singaporean government had asked the US and Malaysia for assistance in its investigation.
The three men were among nine people arrested last Wednesday as part of raids on 22 locations across Singapore, in which documents and electronic records were also seized. If convicted, they face up to 20 years in prison.
Two of the individuals — Alan Wei Zhaolun, 48, and Aaron Woon Guo Jie, 40 — work at a company called Aperia Cloud Services as chief executive and chief operating officer, respectively.
A 51-year-old Chinese national named Li Miang is accused of fraudulently claiming the end user of the items for which he was buying was a company called Luxuriate Your Life, a Singaporean computer equipment sales company.
Their case has been adjourned until Friday. Neither Aperia nor Luxuriate Your Life responded to requests for comment about the case.
On its website, Aperia said that “as Nvidia’s first qualified Nvidia Cloud Partner in south-east Asia”, it is “uniquely positioned with priority access to the highest performing [graphics processing units] available in the market”.
The US government has been tightening restrictions in recent months on advanced semiconductors from American companies being exported to China.
Separately, the EU last week imposed sanctions on a Singaporean chip distributor as part of its crackdown on companies helping Russia advance its defence and security sector.
Splendent Technologies was one of 43 companies added to the EU’s list of entities under sanctions on the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The company did not respond to a request for comment, but added a message to its website saying that trading with Russia had been suspended.
It is the second Singaporean company to be put under sanctions by the EU in relation to the Ukraine war, following the inclusion of a manufacturer of night-vision goggles in 2023.
