Nvidia chips case: Man charged with fraud allegedly used over S$38m in ill-gotten gains to buy house

[SINGAPORE] A man accused of fraud in a case allegedly linked to chipmaker Nvidia is said to have used more than S$38 million in purported ill-gotten gains to buy a landed property.

On Monday (Jul 6), Alan Wei Zhaolun, 50, was handed nine additional charges – three counts of money laundering and six counts of fraud.

The Singaporean former chief executive of a group of companies – A-Speed Infotech, Aperia International and Aperia Cloud Services (II) – now faces 11 charges in all.

He is accused of using more than S$38 million of alleged ill-gotten gains to buy the house in Chee Hoon Avenue, near Adam Road, between July and October 2024.

In an earlier statement, the police said that the good-class bungalow was valued at around S$55 million.

Wei is also said to have acquired more than S$5 million in total in two bank accounts that year.

Around S$3.2 million of the amount is alleged to be the benefits of purported criminal conduct.

According to his latest charges, he also allegedly conspired with Aaron Woon Guo Jie, 41, and Jenny Lim, 51, to commit fraud multiple times in 2023 and 2024.

The police said the fraud charges allege that the trio engaged in a conspiracy to commit fraud linked to the purchase of servers from three suppliers – Dell, Super Micro Computer and Asus.

Without revealing further details, a police spokesperson added: “The charges asserted that... they falsely represented, in communications to these suppliers, that one of the Aperia Group companies would be the end-user of the servers.”

On Monday, Aperia International was charged with five counts of fraud, while Aperia Cloud Services (II) was handed two such charges.

A-Speed Infotech was charged with one count of fraud.

The pre-trial conferences for the three companies and Wei will be held on Aug 14.

Wei is represented by lawyers from WongPartnership.

In a statement on Monday, they said their client and the companies will be contesting all the charges against them.

They added: “The companies and Mr Wei are fully cooperating with the authorities so that the regulatory flux is taken into consideration when reviewing the alleged offences.

“The charges relate to commercial transactions involving suppliers and customers from the (United States) and elsewhere, which required multi-jurisdictional regulatory compliance.”

Wei, Woon and a third man, Li Ming, 52, were first hauled to court in February 2025.

This was after Singapore came under the spotlight in a US investigation into whether Chinese start-up DeepSeek had circumvented US restrictions on advanced Nvidia chips by buying them from third parties in other countries, including the Republic.

The three men were then handed fraud-related charges.

In January 2025, DeepSeek launched a free artificial intelligence assistant at a fraction of the cost of US models by using less data.

Within days, it became the most downloaded app in Apple’s App Store and stirred concerns about the US’ lead in AI, sparking a rout that wiped around US$1 trillion off the value of US technology stocks.

Lim was charged later, and the cases are pending. THE STRAITS TIMES