Why Singapore keeps surfacing in Nvidia chips and China controversy
The logo of data center company Megaspeed International is pictured at its office in the Ocean Financial Centre in Singapore on November 10, 2026.
Taryn Ng | Afp | Getty Images
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 Beijing’s surging AI development.
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…
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