By Xinghui Kok

SINGAPORE/BEIJING (Reuters) - Singapore charged three men with fraud in a case domestic media have linked to the movement of Nvidia's (NVDA) advanced chips from the city state to Chinese artificial intelligence firm DeepSeek.

The United States is investigating if DeepSeek, the Chinese company whose AI model's performance rocked the tech world in January, has been using U.S. chips that are not allowed to be shipped to China, Reuters reported earlier.

The Singapore case is part of a broader police investigation of 22 individuals and companies suspected of false representation, amid concerns that organised AI chip smuggling to China has been tracked out of nations such as Singapore.

Broadcaster Channel News Asia said it understood the cases were linked to the alleged movement of Nvidia chips from Singapore to be used by DeepSeek, without identifying its source.

Singapore's government did not immediately respond to email queries whether the charges were linked to Nvidia and DeepSeek.

Charge-sheets accused two Singaporeans, identified as Aaron Woon Guo Jie, 41, and Alan Wei Zhaolun, 49, with criminal conspiracy to commit fraud on a supplier of servers in 2024.

They did this "by fraudulently making a false representation that the items would not be transferred to a person other than the authorised ultimate consignee of end users", the court papers added.

The third person charged is Chinese national Li Ming, 51, accused of committing fraud on a supplier of servers in 2023 by claiming a Singapore-registered company Luxuriate Your Life Pte Ltd would be the end user of the items.

DeepSeek, Nvidia and Luxuriate Your Life did not immediately reply to requests for comment.

If found guilty of the offences, the men could face penalties of a jail term of up to 20 years or a fine or both.

The police and charge documents did not elaborate on the items involved in the case, or identify the supplier of servers.

On Thursday, police said in a statement they had arrested nine people in a joint operation with customs authorities on Wednesday, raiding 22 locations from which they seized documentary and electronic records.

Singapore is Nividia's second-biggest market after the United States, accounting for 18% of its total revenue in its latest fiscal year, a recent filing by the chipmaker shows.

Actual shipments to the Asian trading hub, however, contributed less than 2% of total revenue, as customers use it as a centre for invoicing sales to other countries.

Last week, Singapore's foreign minister vowed to enforce multilateral export control regimes, saying the city state would not tolerate evasion, deception, false declarations or miscounting.

(Reporting by Xinghui Kok and Eduardo Baptista; Editing by Miyoung Kim and Clarence Fernandez)