Why Singapore keeps turning up in the fight over Nvidia chips and China

Singapore, a hub for billions of dollars' worth of Nvidia sales each year, finds itself increasingly in the crosshairs of Washington's push to stop advanced AI chips from reaching China, as the chipmaker CEO's scandal once again thrusts the city-state into the spotlight.

The Southeast Asian nation said Thursday that it had barred Alice Huang, the businesswoman at the center of a scandal that catalyzed the end of Jensen Huang's run as Nvidia CEO, from re-entering the country.

A fifth person was handed 41 charges on Friday in a Singapore fraud case involving computer servers that might have contained Nvidia chips and were exported to Malaysia. The alleged transactions in the broader case totaled about $390 million, prosecutors said March last year.

The investigations into several companies and key officials, including Megaspeed International, began in February 2025 and remained ongoing as of Thursday.

Authorities have been examining whether servers exported through Singapore to Malaysia without entering the domestic market were subsequently rerouted to another destination, contrary to declarations made in Singapore, the Ministry of Home Affairs said in a statement late Thursday.

Singapore has faced growing international scrutiny, particularly from the U.S., over its role as a major billing and potential transit hub for Nvidia chips that U.S. officials say have reached China.

The U.S. has imposed export restrictions on Nvidia's most cutting-edge AI chips to China since 2022 to curb China's rise in technology.

Nvidia's revenue linked to Singapore rose to 22% in the fiscal quarter ending July 2025, up from 8% in 2023, with the country's trade ministry estimating chips physically delivered there accounted for less than 1% of the chipmaker's revenue.

Singapore at the crossroads?

Experts have pointed to gaps in enforcement of U.S. export restrictions and Singapore's corporate system that make it hard to trace where advanced Nvidia chips ultimately end up.

Nvidia chips can be legally sold to customers in other countries, such as Malaysia or Singapore, and then illicitly resold or re-exported to China. Chinese companies can also legally gain remote access to the most advanced AI chips hosted in data centers outside China rather than buying the hardware directly.

Chris McGuire, a senior fellow at Council on Foreign Relations and former U.S. national security official, said that Southeast Asia has become "a major hub for chip smuggling and export control circumvention," importing tens of billions of dollars' worth of AI chips per year.

Singapore has stepped up efforts to police suspected chip diversion since last year, including investigations involving alleged fraud and money laundering.

Authorities acknowledged the potential "blind spots between separate monitoring of trade flows and banking flows," said Alvin Camba, lead scientist and director of research at Lyvi, an Austin-based AI risk assessment firm. Correlating physical shipments with related financial transactions can be "challenging," he added.

"Singapore's strong corporate secrecy regulations, which offer extensive protections for foreign investors, can also make it difficult to rapidly identify the true recipients of goods," Camba said.

Those challenges can be exploited to "obfuscate financial flows and potentially circumvent global restrictions on technology transfers," he added, urging constant adaptation from regulators.

'Limited' U.S. help

Singapore said it had received limited help from U.S. authorities in its yearlong investigation.

Police sought information on Super Micro Computer Inc., a U.S. server supplier relevant to the probe, but the company provided limited cooperation, according to the Thursday statement.

The city-state first raised the issue with U.S. authorities in July 2025, and has repeated its request on several occasions since September last year. "Despite these repeated requests, Singapore has to date received limited information or assistance in respect of the company," it said.

Police interviewed Alice Huang, a Hong Kong resident who was then Megaspeed's CEO, chairperson and a key controller, in June 2025.

In February 2026, authorities concluded that there was insufficient evidence that she had committed offenses related to the declarations under investigation. She was nonetheless barred from re-entering Singapore after being found providing inaccurate information to downplay her role in Megaspeed.

The country does not enforce "unilateral export controls" imposed by other countries, the ministry said in Thursday's statement, but it expects companies operating there to take foreign export rules into account in their international business activities.

Megaspeed, which was spun off from a Chinese gaming company, became Nvidia's largest Southeast Asian customer in less than three years and has bought more than $4.8 billion worth of its chips since June 2024, according to The New York Times, though the company has denied any wrongdoing.

Alice Huang, whom U.S. intelligence identified as a Chinese intelligence asset passing information to Beijing, served as managing director at Megaspeed for eight months in 2023 but has reportedly continued to play a leading role at the company.

Jensen Huang has resigned as Nvidia CEO on Thursday, ending 33 years at the helm after revelations that he had two extramarital affairs, plunging the chipmaker at the heart of the global AI boom into crisis.

Nvidia appointed Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress as interim CEO while its board searches for a permanent successor.