Man allegedly linked to Nvidia chips case in Singapore out on $1m bail, may face more charges
Source: Straits Times
Article Date: 03 May 2025
Author: Shaffiq Alkhatib
The authorities in the US are looking into the potential circumvention of export controls for advanced Nvidia chips.
Three men allegedly linked to computer servers exported to Malaysia that might contain Nvidia chips have been released on bail and at least one of them might face additional charges.
Chinese national Li Ming, 51, is now out on bail of $1 million.
Singaporeans Alan Wei Zhaolun, 48, and Aaron Woon Guo Jie, 40, are out on bail of $800,000 and $600,000 respectively.
Nvidia is a leading artificial intelligence (AI) chip designer in the US.
On May 2, Deputy Public Prosecutor Phoebe Tan asked the court to grant a 12-week adjournment for the three as investigations were ongoing.
However, Li’s lawyer asked for his client’s case to be adjourned for a pre-trial conference instead.
When District Judge Ng Cheng Thiam asked why the adjournment was needed, DPP Tan said the case was complex and Li could face more charges.
Lawyers acting for the Singaporeans did not object to the prosecutor’s suggestion.
The judge granted an eight-week adjournment for the three, and their cases will be mentioned again on June 27.
Li faces two charges – one of fraud and one under the Computer Misuse Act.
Woon and Wei face 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.
The pair 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 showed that servers from US firms 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.
Home Affairs and Law Minister K. Shanmugam said on March 3 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 AI chips to China.
Questions were raised in the US in 2025 when a Chinese start-up launched DeepSeek, an AI platform allegedly using chips from Nvidia.
The launch of DeepSeek in January wiped around US$1 trillion (S$1.3 trillion) off the value of US tech stocks.
The authorities in the US are looking into the potential circumvention of its export controls for advanced Nvidia chips.
The chip designer in a statement said there was no reason to believe DeepSeek had obtained any export-controlled products from Singapore.
Mr Shanmugam said Singapore was investigating if Malaysia was a final destination for the servers or if the servers went somewhere else.
He added that if there were false representations within Singapore about the servers’ final destination, then an offence under the country’s laws had been committed.
Source: The Straits Times © SPH Media Limited. Permission required for reproduction.
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