U.S. tech execs smuggled Nvidia chips to China, prosecutors say
NVIDIA AI Computing Card was seized on December 9, 2025 in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, China.
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The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York has accused partners of an unidentified U.S. server manufacturer of illegally diverting billions of dollars in artificial intelligence servers to China.
While American companies like Anthropic and OpenAI face challenges from DeepSeek and other Chinese rivals, the US government is trying to understand how high-powered chips are reaching China without permission.
Inside an indictment The U.S. government, whose seal was released Thursday, alleged that Yih-Shyan “Wally” Liaw, Ruei-Tsan “Steven” Chang and Ting-Wei “Willy” Sun worked together to violate the Export Control Reform Act.
Liaw is co-founder of server manufacturer Super Micro Computer and is a member of the board of directors. He controls Super Micro shares worth $464 million, according to FactSet. Liaw and Super Micro did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
According to the indictment, an intermediary Southeast Asian company forged documents that appeared to use the servers and had a separate logistics firm repackage the servers to disguise them before they went to China.
According to the indictment, the defendants attempted to deceive the server maker’s compliance team with “fake” servers at the Southeast Asian company’s storage facilities, while the real servers had already been shipped to China.
Nvidia’s Graphics processing units for training generative AI models are in demand worldwide.
The server company’s products containing Nvidia chips “are subject to strict U.S. export controls that prevent their sale to China without a license,” the plaintiff said in the indictment. “These controls exist to protect, among other things, the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States.”
US President Donald Trump initially tried to block China from buying the processors. But he said he told Chinese President Xi Pinging in December that the US would allow Nvidia to ship H200 GPUs to China “under conditions that allow for strong National Security to remain in place.” Earlier this week, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the chipmaker had restarted production to meet H200 purchase orders from China.
Last summer, Nvidia received a license to export its H20 chip to China, and Huang agreed to provide 15% of its sales in China to the United States.
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