The Singaporean government recently announced that it believes advanced chips and GPU from the brand, NVIDIA, may have made their way into Malaysia before ultimately reaching their final destination in China. Three men, including a Chinese national, were charged with fraud in the island nation, linking them to an ongoing case regarding the transfer of said chips from the country to Chinese AI firm, DeepSeek.
It is believed that DeepSeek somehow procured US$1.6 billion (~RM7.14 billion) in hardware and supposedly has a massive stock of 50,000 NVIDIA Hopper GPUs. The inventory includes 10,000 H800 and 10,000 H100 GPUs, plus additional purchases of H20 units.
Singapore’s Home Affairs and Law Minister, K. Shanmugam, said that the chips were “smuggled” into Malaysia via servers made by Dell Technologies and Super Micro Computer. “Whether Malaysia was the final destination … we do not know for certain at this point,” he said, adding that the authorities were investigating the case independently after an anonymous tip-off.
Our government has denied that NVIDIA’s chips were smuggled through the country and that it takes such allegations seriously. “Malaysia’s policy aligns with control measures implemented by the United States (US), the European Union (EU), and the United Kingdom,” Tengku Zafrul Abdul Aziz, Minister of Investment, Trade and Industry told reporters back in February.
At the time of writing, neither NVIDIA nor DeepSeek have commented on the matter.
(Source: Reuters)
