Singapore expects US companies to comply with US government export control measures and Singapore’s laws, the Ministry of Trade and Industry (MTI) said in a statement on Saturday (Feb 1). The statement came as questions arose about China’s potential to bypass the US ban and purchase Nvidia’s cutting-edge artificial intelligence chips through a third party for building the DeepSeek large language model.
“Questions have arisen about whether DeepSeek obtained Nvidia chips, which are subject to U.S. export controls, through middlemen in Singapore,” Bloomberg reportedly said, citing a statement from Singapore’s Ministry of Trade and Industry.
A senior executive in the Silicon Valley AI industry recently revealed to the American financial TV channel CNBC that DeepSeek has 50,000 Nvidia H100 advanced AI chips. How these 50,000 chips, which are on the strictly controlled export list, ended up in the hands of DeepSeek has become the focus of the US investigation.
Reuters reported on Saturday, citing sources, that after the United States imposed strict export controls on cutting-edge chips on China, an organized smuggling of artificial intelligence chips to China has emerged, with countries such as Singapore, Malaysia and the United Arab Emirates being implicated.
DeepSeek, an open source artificial intelligence language model developed by DeepSeek, a subsidiary of Huanfang Quantitative, a previously unknown Chinese technology company, using low-cost hardware, has recently emerged and is said to be on par with the most advanced AI models in the United States in terms of performance. It once shocked the Western technology and financial circles, and some people even marveled at the failure of the US blockade policy on China’s high-tech sector.
The download volume of DeepSeek app on Apple App Store once surpassed ChatGPT, ranking first in the download volume ranking. Global investors were also affected by this and sold off US technology stocks in large quantities, causing losses of more than one trillion US dollars to US technology stocks. Nvidia’s market value evaporated by US$593 billion in one day. This is the largest single-day evaporation of market value of a company in the US stock market.
Reuters, Bloomberg and other media reported on Friday that the U.S. government has launched an investigation into whether DeepSeek purchased Nvidia’s cutting-edge chips through a third-party company in Singapore.
Bloomberg reported that U.S. President Donald Trump met with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at the White House on Friday.
Trump said after meeting with Huang that the U.S. would eventually impose tariffs on chips, a move that could cause trouble for Nvidia, which relies on foundry partners like TSMC to produce the cutting-edge chips it designs.
CNBC reported that an Nvidia spokesperson told the media on Monday that DeepSeek uses chips that are fully compliant with U.S. export controls. The report said that the TV station has not yet received a comment from DeepSeek on the matter.
“We expect American companies like Nvidia to comply with U.S. export controls and our domestic legislation. Our customs and law enforcement agencies will continue to work closely with their U.S. counterparts,” CNBC quoted Singapore’s Ministry of Trade and Industry as saying in a statement.
“We always uphold the rule of law and take decisive and resolute action against individuals and companies that violate the rules,” the statement added.
Bloomberg pointed out that DeepSeek has not fully disclosed the chips used in its artificial intelligence large language model, but its researchers mentioned in a paper published last month that they used Nvidia’s H800 chip designed and produced specifically for the Chinese market for training. H800 is a less advanced chip tailored for the Chinese market by Nvidia to meet the requirements of the US ban after the Biden administration banned the export of cutting-edge chips to China.
In its third-quarter earnings report released in November last year, Nvidia pointed out that Singapore accounted for nearly 22% of its revenue, and said that “shipments related to Singapore revenue are all shipped to regions outside Singapore, and shipments to Singapore are negligible.”
Singapore’s Ministry of Trade and Industry specifically mentioned Nvidia’s claims in a statement on Saturday, saying that Nvidia had no reason to believe that DeepSeek obtained export-controlled chips through Singapore.
“Singapore is an international trade hub. Major US and European companies operate substantial operations here. Nvidia has explained that many of these customers use their business entities in Singapore to source chips for use in products in the US and other Western countries,” the statement said.