Singaporean Home Affairs and Law Minister Kasiviswanathan Shanmugam has called on the United States to provide information relating to an ongoing fraud investigation involving U.S.-built servers with embedded Nvidia microchips.
The announcement on March 3 was made after the city-state arrested three men during a raid and charged them with false representation.
“The case relates to servers with chips embedded in them coming into Singapore, and then from Singapore, they went to Malaysia,” he said.
“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. But we assessed that there may have been false representation on the final destination of the servers,” Shanmugam told the press.
He pointed out that the Singaporean authorities suspected that the servers contained components “subject to US export controls.”
Shanmugam noted that investigators needed more information from the United States because the two computer hardware brands were produced there.
Shanmugam went on to say that his country also wanted answers from Malaysia.
He told reporters that Singapore was not acting at the behest of the United States but that a tip-off originating in America triggered the arrests.
When pressed for details of the fraud case, he stated merely that inaccurate “declarations” were made “about ultimate destination of the servers” to Singaporean agencies, which amounted to fraud.
On Dec. 2, 2024, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security issued several restrictions, extending controls to 24 types of semiconductor manufacturing equipment along with three categories of tools used in their production.
On Dec. 9, 2024, the Chinese regime’s State Administration for Market Regulation announced that it had launched a probe of technology company Nvidia Corp over alleged violations of China’s anti-monopoly law.
