Singapore says Nvidia's astounding local sales don't mean it's the source of DeepSeek's GPUs
PLUS: Chinese bus lanes put Tesla in a tangle; India drops electronics tariffs; Samsung worries about soft demand
Asia In Brief Nvidia’s quarterly results occasionally raise eyebrows because they report that Singapore is a disproportionately large market for its wares. In a Q3 2025 filing [PDF], for example, the accelerator colossus revealed that Singapore is its second-largest market and accounted for 22 percent of revenue.
That’s a very odd result, because while Singapore is home to at least 70 datacenters, many hosting hyperscalers, the nation’s population is just six million and the nation’s government regulates datacenter energy consumption. Singaporean datacenter operators have announced but not yet delivered large scale conversion to AI infrastructure ops and there’s little sign that a quarter of Nvidia’s output is deployed in the tiny island nation.
The above became salient last week after widespread realization that China’s DeepSeek large language models outperform American rivals shocked investors. US authorities were reportedly also shocked, leading them to consider whether hardware used to train DeepSeek’s models made it into the Middle Kingdom through Singapore. If that were the case, it would potentially be a breach of US bans on such sales.
Nvidia has previously explained its outsized Singaporean sales by telling investors “End customer and shipping location may be different from our customer’s billing location.
“For example, most shipments associated with Singapore revenue were to locations other than Singapore and shipments to Singapore were insignificant,” the company stated in its most recent financial filings.
Speculation about how Nvidia hardware reaches China saw Singapore’s Ministry of Trade and Industry on February 1st publish a statement [PDF] that supported Nvidia’s past statements.
“Singapore is an international business hub. Major US and European companies have significant operations here. Nvidia has explained that many of these customers use their business entities in Singapore to purchase chips for products destined for the US and other Western countries,” the ministry stated.
The document also cites Nvidia’s assertions that “there is no reason to believe that DeepSeek obtained any export-controlled products from Singapore” and adds the ministry’s view: “We expect US companies, like Nvidia, to comply with US export controls and our domestic legislation.”
“Our customs and law enforcement agencies will continue to work closely with their US counterparts. We have always upheld the rule of law, and acted decisively and firmly against individuals and companies that flout the rules.”
All of which is very nice, but ignores one important fact: the Nvidia hardware apparently used to train DeepSeek’s models was the H800 accelerator, which could legally be exported to China until late 2023. DeepSeek could therefore have acquired its hardware years ago without breaking any rules.
India drops tariffs key electronics
India has dropped tariffs on lithium-ion batteries and some components used to manufacture smartphones.
Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman pitched [PDF] the measures as boosts to domestic electronics manufacturing, and fuel for a transition to electric vehicles. India’s government wants to manufacture more electronics and cars locally, to meet local demand and grow exports.
But it’s not all good news for the electronics sector, as the budget also brought an increase on tariffs for displays used in digital signage applications – seemingly to make imported products more expensive and encourage local manufacturing. Duties were removed on smaller displays used in smartphones.
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Chinese bus lanes put Tesla in a tangle
Small government advocate Elon Musk last week briefly stepped into one of his day jobs - CEO of electric carmaker Tesla - to announce its results. Along the way he revealed that the company is struggling to implement full self-driving (FSD) due to Chinese laws and bus lanes.
Asked on an earnings call about when FSD will become available, Musk said Tesla faces challenges delivering it in China because “they currently allow us to transfer training video outside of China. And then the US government won't let us do training in China … It's like a quandary.”
Tesla’s workaround is to use “videos of streets in China that are available on the Internet … and then feeding that into our training so that publicly available video of street signs and traffic rules in China can be used for training and then also putting it in a very accurate simulator.”
But that effort is complicated by China’s bus lanes, which Musk described as “very complicated” because “there's like literally like hours of the day that you're allowed to be there and not be there.”
“And then if you accidently go in at bus lane at the wrong time, you get an automatic ticket instantly. And so, it was kind of a big deal, bus lanes in China. So, we put that into our simulator train on that, the car has to know what time of day it is, read the sign.”
Musk told investors Tesla will “get this solved” and predicted the company will deliver “unsupervised FSD in most countries by the end of next year.”
Samsung profits dip as revenue improves
Samsung Electronics last week announced results for its full 2024 financial year, with mixed news for investors.
On the upside, revenue hit ₩300.9 trillion ($205.8 billion) for the year and profit came in at ₩32.7 trillion ($22.4 billion). That’s Samsung’s second—highest revenue figure of all time, behind only the 2022 financial year.
But Q4 revenue and profit fell quarter-on-quarter, and the company told investors “soft market conditions especially for IT products” were to blame and things won’t get better in Q1 of its 2025 financial year due to “weakness in the semiconductors business”.
That’s unwelcome news as the AI infrastructure building boom should mean plenty of profits.
Samsung has a plan to make that happen.
“The Memory Business achieved record-high fourth-quarter revenue, backed by a higher blended DRAM average selling price due to the increased sales of high-bandwidth memory and high-density DDR5 for servers,” investors were told.
Samsung’s memory biz will now “shift its business portfolio to more high-value-added products by accelerating the migration to cutting-edge nodes to respond to the demand for high-performance and high-density products.” That plan will see Samsung accelerate development of its 1b nanometer (nm) process for building DDR5 and LPPDR5x DRAM. NAND products will also be shifted to more advanced processes.
The company also hopes the new Galaxy S25 premium smartphones give its bottom line a boost, is working to make 200MP cameras a feature in more SoCs, and sees an opportunity to capitalize on expected modest growth in TV sales by adding AI features to its range.
Hitachi re-orgs to get more digital
Japanese industrial giant Hitachi last week announced [PDF] a re-org to “leverage its strengths in IT, OT and products, and to accelerate the creation of Hitachi's unique value globally, with digital at its core.”
To make that happen, the company has appointed Jun Abe to the new role of Executive Vice President and Executive Officer in charge of Digital Systems & Services. That fancy title confers leadership of digital business across the entire Hitachi Group, “further strengthening the collaboration between Digital Systems & Services and the OT and products areas, and further accelerating the digitization of each business.”
Inevitably, the re-org also includes creation of a “Digital Engineering & AI Solutions Business Unit” and a “AI & Software Services” business unit. ®