Policing What Passes Through: Singapore’s Answer to US Chip Controls

US export controls on advanced chips increasingly depend on jurisdictions whose strategic importance lies in what they host, handle, and route. In a recent article, I examine how Singapore, the paradigm of such a ‘hub economy’, responds to US pressure over AI-chip diversion. Singapore has kept its export-control law anchored to multilateral non-proliferation lists and has reached diversion through general criminal law instead. That balance holds for now, but pending US measures could narrow the space for maintaining it.

The debate on semiconductor statecraft has centered on ‘chokepoint economies’ such as Taiwan, the Netherlands, and Japan, which hold nodes of the supply chain others cannot easily replicate. Washington asks them to restrict what they produce. Singapore does not control the leading edge, yet it accounts for around a tenth of global chip output and a fifth of chip-equipment production, and it is the region’s main node for routing and redistribution. Of hub economies, Washington asks something else: police what you host, handle, and route. A 2026 House Select Committee report names Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand repeatedly as routing points for smuggled hardware.

Singapore’s Strategic Goods (Control) Act is territorial and list-based: it controls goods crossing Singapore’s border, technology transmitted from Singapore, and brokering conducted from Singapore, and its control list tracks the four multilateral export-control regimes. The US Export Administration Regulations follow the item across borders, into transfers between foreign countries and changes of end user within them. Since October 2022, Washington has added unilateral performance thresholds for advanced chips that no multilateral list contains, and Singapore has not adopted them. An AI chip that needs a US license can, therefore, pass through Singapore without engaging Singapore’s statute, unless it independently falls within a listed category or the weapons-of-mass-destruction catch-all.

Singapore could align if it chose to. In March 2022, it imposed export controls on Russia without a UN mandate, mapped onto multilateral list categories. Alignment, therefore, turns on political judgment, not legal capacity. Importing US technology-denial parameters would convert a non-proliferation statute into an instrument of great-power rivalry, contradict Singapore’s declared refusal to choose sides, and erode its value as a trusted hub. I call this ‘doctrinal independence’: Singapore retains control over the categories its own law recognizes.

Within that boundary, Singapore practices what I term ‘doctrinal substitution’. In February 2025, three men were charged over servers, likely containing Nvidia chips, moved from Singapore to Malaysia. Two of the accused, identified as officers of Aperia International, allegedly represented to Dell that the servers would not be transferred beyond the authorized consignee. The charges, for fraud by false representation and conspiracy to commit it, were brought under the Penal Code; no export-control offense was charged. The Minister for Home Affairs, K. Shanmugam, described the case as ‘unrelated’ to US export controls and an ‘independent investigation conducted by Singapore’. The fraud framing depoliticizes enforcement. It reaches the deception, leaves export-control law untouched, and presents the prosecution as Singapore enforcing its own law. Washington sees diversion through Singapore prosecuted; Beijing sees no sign that Singapore has adopted US controls.

Fraud liability operates after the fact and one transaction at a time: it supplies no licensing, no screening before shipment, and no denial orders excluding a party from future trade. It is weakest where the object is knowledge. Under the Export Administration Regulations, releasing controlled technology to a third-country national at a Singapore facility can constitute a deemed reexport requiring a license; Singapore’s Strategic Goods (Control) Act does not treat nationality alone as turning domestic access into an export. The Computer Misuse Act is built around wrongful access, so where an employee retrieves data lawfully and only later decides to pass it abroad, the Act may not reach the disclosure. Singapore also has no standalone trade secrets statute.

Recent and pending US measures move controls from shipments toward access, location, and ownership, precisely where hubs sit. The Remote Access Security Act, a bill passed by the House in January 2026 but not yet enacted, would bring cloud access to controlled chips within export controls, including in Singapore-hosted data centers. The proposed Chip Security Act would require location verification on advanced chips. The Commerce Department’s 2025 Affiliates Rule, suspended for a year from November 2025, and the proposed STOP Shells Act target subsidiaries owned by listed entities. Singapore’s participation in Pax Silica, framed around ‘economic security’, adds a vocabulary closer to Washington’s than to the non-proliferation categories on which Singapore’s statute rests. Together, these measures ask hubs to prevent diversion before it occurs, which fraud law, operating only after the fact, cannot do.

For a hub economy, sovereign agency means retaining control over the domestic legal categories through which external pressure becomes enforceable obligation. Singapore has so far managed that; the next round of US legislation could test whether it can continue.

This post is based on the author’s article ‘Singapore’s Silicon Statecraft: Doctrinal Independence through Substitution under US Extraterritorial Export Controls’, World Trade Review (2026).

Han-Wei Liu is Associate Professor of Law at the Yong Pung How School of Law, Singapore Management University (SMU), and Deputy Director of the SMU Centre for Digital Law.