Malaysia, alongside Singapore and the UAE, was accused as being used as a transit point in the smuggling of NVIDIA AI chips into China earlier in the year. While MITI minister Tengku Zafrul Abdul Aziz has denied such claims, he has also recently said that the country will be tightening regulations on chip shipments.
This comes following pressure from the US, according to the Financial Times. Included was a quote from the MITI minister saying that the US “is asking us to make sure that we monitor every chip shipment that comes to Malaysia when it involves NVIDIA chips”.
To that effect, Zafrul says that he has formed a task force with digital minister Gobind Singh Deo for the tightening of regulations around Malaysia’s growing data centre industry, which relies on NVIDIA chips. “They want us to make sure that servers end up in data centres that they’re supposed to and not suddenly move to another ship”, the minister adds.
Mentioned in the report was the claim that the investigation has not found evidence that chips being smuggled to China first arrived “at the Malaysian data centre where they were supposedly delivered”. Also mentioned was Zafrul’s acknowledgement of the challenges of tracking semiconductors through global supply chains.
(Source: FT)
