Sanctioned Nvidia accelerators for DeepSeek may have reached China via Malaysia and Singapore

The investigation into the origins of Nvidia accelerators that ended up in China for the needs of the startup DeepSeek is growing. Singaporean authorities have established that the suspects supplied Dell and Super Micro servers to Malaysia, but could not confirm where they were ultimately used. Investigators suspect that the equipment could have been sent to China in circumvention of sanctions.

Image source: NVIDIA

Singapore’s Law Minister K. Shanmugam today acknowledged the veracity of local media reports about the investigation, which has already led to the arrest of several people, Bloomberg reports. They are suspected of providing false information to server hardware suppliers about the end use of their products. Singaporean middlemen formally sent Dell and Super Micro servers to Malaysia, but there are reasons to suspect that they ended up in China or other countries unfriendly to the United States.

Singapore authorities have requested information from Malaysia about the end users of the equipment supplied. According to the Singaporean minister, it is not yet possible to say with certainty whether Malaysia was the final destination for these supplies. It was possible to find out that the Nvidia accelerators contained in these servers could have been on the sanctions list. Dell and Super Micro were forced to audit their product supplies in Southeast Asia at Nvidia’s request. Singapore authorities have no grounds to claim that the supplies via Malaysia are related to the activities of DeepSeek or any other Chinese company. According to Shanmugam, the investigation was initiated at the request of anonymous informants and is not directly related to the violation of US export control rules, nor was it initiated at the request of a third country.

Nvidia’s annual report notes that less than 2% of its output by value physically goes to Singapore, although about 18% of the company’s annual revenue passes through local accounts. The Malaysian example shows that the logistics of Nvidia-based server hardware can be complex and confusing, making investigations difficult.