Nvidia chips probe in Singapore: Cases slated for Oct 17 pre-trial conference

SINGAPORE – Three men allegedly linked to the export of computer servers that might have contained export-controlled Nvidia chips have had their cases adjourned to Oct 17 for a pre-trial conference.

During these proceedings, the prosecution and defence will have a discussion behind closed doors on how to manage the trio’s cases.

The case involving one of the men – Chinese national Li Ming, 51 – was mentioned in court on Aug 22.

Deputy Public Prosecutor Louis Ngia asked District Judge Brenda Tan for an eight-week adjournment of the case as the investigations were of a “significant scale”.

Li is represented by lawyers Wendell Wong and Andrew Chua of Drew & Napier.

Mr Wong raised his concerns about the pace of the proceedings, which he found to be “troubling”, adding: “Justice delayed is justice denied.”

DPP Ngia denied the allegation that justice was delayed and stressed that investigations take time.

The court heard that the current charges are not the finalised ones as investigations are ongoing.

He also said that investigations are still at a rather early stage as they started only about six months ago.

Home Affairs Minister K. Shanmugam had said that the servers most likely

contained items subject to export controls by the US.

The US government had in 2022 imposed a number of export controls to restrict the sale of high-performance artificial intelligence (AI) chips, such as those by chipmaker Nvidia, to China.

Li and Singaporeans Aaron Woon Guo Jie, 41, and Alan Wei Zhaolun, 49,

were first hauled to court in February to face fraud charges

.

This took place after Singapore came under the spotlight in a US investigation into whether Chinese start-up DeepSeek had circumvented US restrictions on advanced Nvidia chips by buying them from third parties in other countries, including the Republic.

The cases involving Woon and Wei were not mentioned in court on Aug 22, but their pre-trial conference will also be held on Oct 17.

Li faces two charges – one of fraud and one under the Computer Misuse Act.

Woon and Wei were earlier handed two fraud charges each.

Li is accused of committing fraud on Supermicro, a supplier of servers, by claiming in 2023 that the end user of the servers would be a company he controlled, called Luxuriate Your Life.

He also allegedly accessed an OCBC corporate bank account without authorisation to make and receive transfers for Luxuriate Your Life on June 19, 2024.

Woon and Wei are accused of being in a criminal conspiracy to defraud two suppliers of servers, Dell and Supermicro.

They allegedly made false representations in 2024 that the servers would not be transferred to a person other than the authorised end users.

Both of them worked at Aperia Cloud Services, a Singapore-based technology company. Wei was the company’s chief executive and Woon its chief operating officer.

Preliminary investigations had shown that servers from US companies Dell and Supermicro, possibly embedded with Nvidia AI chips, were sent to Singapore-based companies before they were exported to Malaysia.

The probe came after an anonymous tip-off.

Questions were raised in the US in 2025 when a Chinese start-up launched DeepSeek, an AI platform allegedly using chips from Nvidia and reportedly developed at a fraction of the costs of its US rivals.

The launch of DeepSeek in January wiped around US$1 trillion (S$1.29 trillion) off the value of US tech stocks.