Taiwan plans to add AI servers and cutting-edge semiconductors to its list of controlled export items, making unlicensed shipments of restricted AI hardware to China a criminal offense under the Foreign Trade Act once the measures take effect, Economic Affairs Minister Kung Ming-hsin told Bloomberg News.
“Going forward, some of our measures on controlled items will correspond to American ones because we have made quite some commitments in the Agreement on Reciprocal Trade,” Kung said in an October 12 interview. Taiwan and the United States signed that trade agreement earlier this year. Kung declined to say when the new measures would be implemented.
Taiwan does not currently treat unauthorized AI chip exports to China as a crime. Officials warn would-be sellers that such shipments may violate US rules, but prosecutors can charge suspected smugglers only under other existing laws. Earlier this year, Taiwanese authorities were exploring legal tools that would allow AI chip smuggling to China to be prosecuted as a criminal violation for the first time.
Taiwan is also assessing whether to extend restrictions beyond companies already on its export blacklist, such as Huawei and SMIC, to all relevant customers in China, the Liberty Times reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The newspaper said Nvidia-equipped AI servers had recently been found flowing from Taiwan into China.
In August, prosecutors in Keelung indicted nine people over the diversion of Nvidia-equipped servers to China, including a distribution manager at Nvidia’s Taiwan office and two sales managers at Super Micro’s Taiwan branch. According to prosecutors, the group ordered 130 B300 servers using end-user documents that named a rented facility in Taiwan. Seventy-four reached customers in China, and customs stopped the remaining 56.
US officials have alleged that billions of dollars’ worth of Nvidia hardware has reached China over the past few years, despite long-standing US restrictions on Chinese purchases of advanced AI chips from Nvidia and AMD. In the United States, federal agents arrested the owner of a California company accused of routing more than $300 million in export-controlled GPU servers to China through Malaysia and Singapore.
President Lai Ching-te has previously said Taiwan would address unspecified US concerns over export controls, without offering details.
On October 16, China’s commerce and science ministries proposed adding 23 AI technologies to the country’s export-control catalogue, covering large models, agents and computing clusters, and began requiring registration for specified technology transfers.
Kung also said in the interview that Taiwan plans to raise billions of dollars to develop industrial parks in the United States, intended as a base for a domestic supply chain serving Nvidia and other AI hardware makers.
Sources: Bloomberg, CNA, Liberty Times
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By the Control Plane Editorial Team