CFO of local tech firm becomes fourth executive to be charged in Nvidia chips probe
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Jenny Lim, the 51-year-old chief financial officer of Aperia Cloud Services, was handed one charge for fraud by the District Court in Singapore on April 2.
ST PHOTO: KELVIN CHNG
SINGAPORE - A fourth executive has been charged over her role in the probe into export-controlled advanced Nvidia chips in Singapore.
Jenny Lim, the 51-year-old chief financial officer of Aperia Cloud Services, was handed one charge for fraud by the District Court in Singapore on April 2.
Aperia Cloud Services is the sole shareholder of tech firm Aperia International.
Her case has been fixed for a pre-trial conference on May 22.
Lim is accused of having conspired with Alan Wei Zhaolun, 50, and Aaron Woon Guo Jie, 41, in committing fraud.
Wei was the chief executive of Aperia Cloud Services, and Woon was the company’s head of sales.
The three executives had allegedly falsely claimed that Aperia International would be the end user of the servers procured from Dell. The servers were later exported to Malaysia.
Home Affairs Minister K. Shanmugam said on March 3, 2025, that the servers possibly contained Nvidia chips.
In total, the authorities in Singapore arrested nine people amid reports that companies in Singapore were linked to the illegal movement of Nvidia chips to China, bypassing US export controls.
The crackdown followed a US probe into possible circumvention of its export controls for advanced Nvidia chips, after Chinese AI firm DeepSeek launched a free AI tool in January 2025 that wiped around US$1 trillion (S$1.29 trillion) off the value of US tech stocks.
US lawmakers singled out Singapore in a letter in January urging National Security Adviser Mike Waltz to subject countries to strict licensing requirements if they were not willing to crack down on shipments to China.
Checks by The Straits Times found that Aperia Cloud Services and Aperia International were incorporated in 2023.
An online archived page for Aperia Cloud Services said the firm provided artificial intelligence computation to startups and enterprises globally.
It also claimed to be the first qualified Nvidia cloud partner in South-east Asia.
Both Wei and Woon face two charges each for being in a criminal conspiracy to commit fraud.
A third man, Chinese national Li Ming, 52, faces one charge for fraud and one under the Computer Misuse Act.
Li is accused of committing the fraud on Supermicro, another supplier of servers, by falsely representing that the end users of the procured servers would be a company he controlled.
The cases for Wei, Woon and Li have been fixed for a pre-trial conference on May 22.
On March 19, the US separately indicted three men for conspiring to divert servers assembled in the US to China, through a company in South-east Asia.
The three men are Supermicro co-founder Yih-Shyan Liaw, Taiwanese sales manager Ruei-Tsang Chang, and third-party contractor Ting-Wei Sun.
The unnamed company in South-east Asia would then repackage the servers using a shipping and logistics company, placing them in unmarked boxes, before sending them to China.
Investigations had found the unnamed company purchased some US$2.5 billion worth of servers from Supermicro between 2024 and 2025.
In response, US lawmakers on March 23 appealed to US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to take immediate action to pause or suspend all active export licences covering advanced Nvidia chips.
The actions would include export to South-east Asian countries such as Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam.
Lawmakers have urged Mr Lutnick to withhold licences until independent end-user verification has been put in place.
