Nvidia’s financial statements have already shown that the company receives 22% of its total revenue in Singapore, although the actual volumes of its products supplied to this country are significantly lower. According to local officials, Singapore consumes no more than 1% of Nvidia’s products in monetary terms.
Image source: NVIDIA
These statements were made by Singapore’s Deputy Minister of Trade and Industry Tan See Land during an investigation by US authorities into the origins of Nvidia computing accelerators that went to Chinese startup DeepSeek. The US side suspects that Singapore was used as an intermediate logistics hub for smuggling Nvidia accelerators that are banned from being supplied to China. A Singaporean official said: “Nvidia’s physical shipments to Singapore represented less than 1% of the company’s total revenue (from August to October last year).” The accelerators supplied to Singapore were mainly used by government organizations and large companies.
Nvidia itself attributes up to 22% of its revenue for the period to Singapore because this is how the invoices are organized. Many companies have representative offices and even headquarters in Singapore, so invoices for Nvidia are issued to a Singapore address, but the physical main batches of this brand’s products are delivered to other countries. Singapore customs authorities are also assisting American investigators trying to understand how the Chinese DeepSeek could have gained access to computing accelerators that are prohibited from being shipped to China. However, the fact of such access has yet to be proven. Singapore authorities claim that they do not condone attempts to smuggle products in violation of export control rules in other countries.