Three men were caught allegedly smuggling banned graphics cards. Now they face long jail time and a high bail if they want to move freely.
Earlier this month, three men were arrested by Singaporean authorities for allegedly smuggling a series of Nvidia chips that are subject to US export restrictions. This was reported by the English-language magazine PCGamer.com.
It concerns graphics chips worth 390 million US dollars
The suspicion was that the hardware was supposed to contain Blackwell chips and that they did not intend to sell them as stated in Malaysia. For this reason, the three men were charged with fraud. It is not just about small sums: Overall, it is said to concern servers with Blackwell chips worth 390 million US dollars.
What happens next? Two men are said to each pay 800,000 and 600,000 US dollars as bail. The third person even has to expect a bail of 1 million US dollars if he wants to be released again. All three men are also prohibited from entering border control points or airports and discussing the case outside of the legal proceedings.
Overall, the three individuals must pay more than 1 million euros.
Some GPUs can no longer be sold to certain countries
Why are the graphics cards banned? The US government, under President Biden, imposed restrictions on Nvidia chips that limited export to a number of countries overseas. Users in these countries are not allowed to import certain graphics cards and must resort to other products. However, Germany is among the 18 countries exempt from the restrictions (via connect.de). Sales would have been allowed in Malaysia as well.
Graphics cards capable of performing AI calculations are particularly affected. Specifically, the so-called Blackwell models are designed for AI and are primarily used for training large chatbots (Large Language Models, or LLM).
The price of certain graphics cards in China has exploded as a result, and dealers are looking for tricks to circumvent the export ban. Graphics cards like the RTX 4090 or RTX 5090 are more in demand than ever and correspondingly expensive in China. This has also attracted smugglers who are keen to profit from it.
Hardware is still a scarce resource, but it looks better than last year. Nevertheless, AMD and Nvidia still dominate the graphics card market, even though Intel now also offers its own GPUs. However, a company from China could at least provide some competition to AMD and Nvidia: A graphics card from China aims to be a strong alternative to AMD and Nvidia for gamers – Will it work?
