US charges Super Micro employees with smuggling Nvidia chips to China

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York has charged associates of an unidentified U.S. server maker with illegally diverting billions of dollars in Nvidia-powered servers to China.

The U.S. government has been trying to figure out how high-powered chips have reached China without authorization, as American artificial intelligence companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI face challenges from DeepSeek and other Chinese rivals.

In an indictment unsealed on Thursday, the U.S. government alleged that Yih-Shyan “Wally” Liaw, Ruei-Tsan “Steven” Chang and Ting-Wei “Willy” Sun worked together to violate the Export Control Reform Act.

The server company’s products containing Nvidia chips “are subject to strict U.S. export controls barring their sale to China without a license,” the plaintiff said in the indictment. “Those controls are in place to protect U.S. national security and foreign policy interests, among other things.”

Liaw is a co-founder of server maker Super Micro Computer and a member of its board of directors. He controls $464 million worth of Super Micro shares, according to FactSet. He did not respond to a request for comment.

Shares of Super Micro fell 12% in extended trading after a federal court released the indictment.

Super Micro said that while the company isn’t named as a defendant, Liaw works as senior vice president of business development, while Chang is a sales manager in Taiwan and Sun is a contractor. The company has placed the employees on leave and ended its relationship with the contractor.

“The conduct by these individuals alleged in the indictment is a contravention of the Company’s policies and compliance controls, including efforts to circumvent applicable export control laws and regulations,” according to a statement. “Supermicro maintains a robust compliance program and is committed to full adherence to all applicable U.S. export and re-export control laws and regulations.”

A Southeast Asian company, acting as a middleman, compiled fake paperwork to appear as if it would be using the servers and had a separate logistics firm repackage the servers to conceal them before going to China, according to the indictment.

The defendants tried to fool the server maker’s compliance team with “dummy” servers at the Southeast Asian company’s storage facilities, while the real servers had already been forwarded to China, and pressured the compliance team into approving shipments, according to the indictment.

The efforts have yielded around $2.5 billion in sales for the server maker since 2024, with $510 million sold between late April 2025 and mid-May 2025 going to the Southeast Asian company and on to China, the indictment said. The plaintiff said the server maker had no U.S. Commerce Department license to export servers featuring Nvidia GPUs to China.

Chang worked on keeping auditors from inspecting parts of data centers where the Southeast Asian company was supposedly keeping the servers but had in fact gone to…