By Bing Hong Lok

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Servers used in a fraud case that Singapore announced last week were supplied by U.S. firms and may have contained Nvidia's ( NVDA ) advanced chips, a government minister said on Monday.

Singapore last week charged three men with fraud in a case local media linked to the movement of Nvidia's ( NVDA ) AI chips from the city-state to Chinese artificial intelligence firm DeepSeek.

Broadcaster Channel News Asia said it understood the cases were linked to the alleged movement of Nvidia ( NVDA ) chips from Singapore to be used by DeepSeek, without identifying its source.

Singapore's Home Affairs and Law Minister K Shanmugam told reporters on Monday that the servers involved in the case were supplied by Dell Technologies ( DELL ) and Super Micro Computer ( SMCI ) before they were sent to Malaysia.

"Whether Malaysia was the final destination ... we do not know for certain at this point," he said, adding the authorities were investigating the case independently after an anonymous tip-off. 

He also said Singapore has asked the U.S. authorities if the servers contained U.S. export control items, and told them it would work with them in any joint investigation.

The United States is investigating if DeepSeek, the Chinese company whose AI model's performance rocked the tech world in January, has been using U.S. chips that are not allowed to be shipped to China, Reuters reported earlier.

Reuters also reported last year that Chinese universities and research institutes obtained Nvidia's ( NVDA ) advanced AI chips embedded in server products made by Dell, Super Micro and Taiwan's Gigabyte Technology.