Three people have been charged with illegally exporting NVIDIA GPUs to China
TL;DR
Three individuals have been charged by the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York with illegally exporting NVIDIA GPUs to China, violating the Export Control Reform Act.
Key Points
- The accused are Yih-Shyan 'Wally' Liaw, Ruei-Tsang 'Steven' Chang, and Ting-Wei 'Willy' Sun – two employees and one contractor at US IT firm Super Micro Computer.
- The scheme involved fake server orders placed through Southeast Asian shell entities, repackaging in Taiwan via a logistics company, and covert shipment to China.
- Dummy servers were staged to deceive inspectors during potential checks.
Nauti's Take
Anyone who thought export controls would solve the GPU problem just got a masterclass in resourcefulness. Fake orders, repackaging in Taiwan, dummy servers for inspectors – this is not opportunistic smuggling, it is a deliberate system.
As long as NVIDIA H100s are worth more than most cars, someone will always factor in the risk. The real question is not whether Super Micro employees did this – it is how many similar operations are currently running undetected.
Sources