Sribala Subramanian
A data center in Singapore ordered $250 million worth of U.S.-made servers containing advanced AI chips. The vendor subsequently shipped the devices to an unauthorized third party.
Did the transaction violate export control laws in both countries?
The question came up in a tariffs-related phone call between Singapore’s Deputy Prime Minister Gan Kim Yong and Howard Lutnick, the U.S. commerce secretary. Lutnick expressed concern about the unrestricted sale of high-end chips “not just to Singapore, but generally.”
The servers were dispatched to a customer in Malaysia and likely contained chips from Nvidia, a leading manufacturer of GPUs (graphics processing units) used by the artificial intelligence companies.
Singapore was Nvidia’s second-largest market in 2024, accounting for nearly $24 billion, or 18 percent of the chip maker’s revenues.
The magnitude of sales to the city-state spurred a U.S. congressional committee to investigate the national security risk posed by Nvidia chip orders from Southeast Asian countries. Lawmakers were concerned that vendors in Singapore and Malaysia may have been part of an illicit chip pipeline for DeepSeek, China’s new artificial intelligence startup.
In February, three individuals faced fraud charges in Singapore for making false statements to U.S. suppliers (Dell and Supermicro) about the identity of the end user.
Nvidia’s spokesperson put out a clarification stating that “the revenue associated with Singapore does not indicate diversion to China.”
In past years, Singapore’s trade surplus ($2.8 billion in 2024) was viewed favorably in Washington, D.C. The affluent city-state splurges on a host of high-end American products ranging from strawberries to semiconductors.
No comments:
Post a Comment