The United States is cracking down on exports of advanced semiconductors to China, seeking to retain a competitive edge over the technology.

But Bloomberg News reported in late January that US officials were probing whether DeepSeek bought advanced Nvidia semiconductors through third parties in Singapore, skirting Washington's restrictions.

K. Shanmugam, who is also the law minister, said the route of the chips emerged in the course of an investigation of three men charged last week with fraud by making false representations.

Local media have linked their cases to the alleged movement of Nvidia chips from Singapore to be used by Chinese AI firm DeepSeek.

"Essentially, the case relates to servers with chips embedded in them coming into Singapore, and then from Singapore, they went to Malaysia," Shanmugam said.

The servers were supplied to Singapore-based companies by US firms Dell and Super Micro, according to Shanmugam.

"The question is whether Malaysia was a final destination or from Malaysia it went to somewhere else, which we do not know for certain at this point," he said.

"But we assessed that there may have been false representation on the final destination of the servers."

He said Singapore had asked both the US and Malaysia for more information.

Pressed about links to Nvidia, Shanmugam said: "We assessed that the servers may contain Nvidia chips. I think that's the highest I can put it at, at this point."

In January, DeepSeek released its R1 chatbot, shaking the global tech market and claiming its tool can match the capacity of top US AI products for a fraction of their costs.