SINGAPORE - Bail has been offered to three men allegedly linked to computer servers exported to Malaysia that might contain Nvidia chips.
Chinese national Li Ming, 51, was offered bail of $1million, while Singaporean Alan Wei Zhaolun, 48, was offered bail of $800,000.
Aaron Woon Guo Jie, 40, also a Singaporean was offered bail of $600,000.
Li facestwo charges — one for fraud and one under the Computer Misuse Act.
Woon and Wei each faces two fraud charges.
Li is accused of committing fraud on Super Micro, 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 commit fraud on two suppliers of servers, Dell and Super Micro.
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 firm’s chief executive and Woon its chief operating officer.
In court on March 13, Li’s lawyer Mr Wendell Wong did not contest the $1 million amount for the bail, but said he is reserving the right to revisit this in the future.
He also clarified with the prosecution about aspects of the conditions of bail they were imposing.
This included information about “exclusion zones” where Li would be not allowed to go to, as well as the prosecution witnesses he was not permitted to interact with.
The prosecution said the “exclusion zones” included immigration points, including Woodlands Checkpoint and Changi Airport.
It added that Li’s wife was a person of interest in investigations and Li should not speak to her about evidence and investigations related to the case.
Wei’s lawyer Mr Shashi Nathan and Woon’s lawyer Mr Rajan Sanjiv Kumar asked the court for lower bail amounts for their clients, noting they were locals and had roots here.
In response, the prosecution said they face serious charges, and the Commercial Affairs Department had uncovered two suppliers. Investigations were ongoing if other suppliers were involved.
The prosecution said the total amount involved in Wei’s and Woon’s cases was believed to be around $250 million, while the total amount in Li’s case was believed to be $140 million.
It added that Wei is believed to have received an eight-figure dividend, while Woon got a seven-figure bonus from a company involved in the case.
The cases against all three men were adjourned to May 2.
Preliminary investigations showed that servers from US firms Dell and Supermicro, possibly embedded with Nvidia artificial intelligence (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 the servers 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 earlier in 2025 when a Chinese start-up launched DeepSeek, an AI platform allegedly using chips from Nvidia, a leading AI chip designer in the US.
The launch of DeepSeek in January wiped around US$1 trillion (S$1.33 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 released a statement to say there was no reason to believe that DeepSeek had obtained any export-controlled products from Singapore.
Mr Shanmugam said the authorities in Singapore are investigating if Malaysia was a final destination for the servers or if the servers went somewhere else.
He added if there were false representations within Singapore about the servers’ final destination, then an offence under the country’s laws had been committed.
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