Organised AI chip smuggling to China has been tracked out of countries including Malaysia, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates, the source said. The Commerce Department and DeepSeek did not immediately return requests for comment.

Several experts, including Elon Musk and Howard Lutnick, nominated to head the US Commerce Department, recently suggested that DeepSeek had found ways to avoid US sanctions. Analysts suspect that Deep

US officials are deep into an investigation to find out if Chinese AI startup DeepSeek found a backdoor route to Nvidia’s high-end chips through Singapore, evading American export bans.