Prosecutors in Keelung indicted nine people on Monday over the export of Nvidia-equipped AI servers to Chinese buyers, including a distribution manager at Nvidia’s Taiwan office whom prosecutors describe as the scheme’s central figure and for whom they are seeking a five-year sentence. Two sales managers at Super Micro’s Taiwan branch were charged alongside him.
The shipments moved on falsified paperwork. According to prosecutors, the group ordered 130 B300 servers from Super Micro using end-user documents stating the machines would be installed at a rented facility in Taiwan. Seventy-four were instead delivered to customers in China, some shipped directly and others routed through Indonesia, Japan and Hong Kong. Taiwanese customs stopped the remaining 56 before they left the island, flagged on a declaration that listed Japan as the destination.
Eight defendants face charges of breach of trust and document forgery. A ninth was charged in a related case involving the alleged siphoning of funds from a distributor. Prosecutors said the defendants were fully aware of their employers’ export procedures and “colluded with one another at various levels for enormous profit, illegally exporting high-end servers.” Neither Nvidia nor Super Micro responded to requests for comment, and neither company is accused of wrongdoing.
It is the first known Taiwanese prosecution over AI accelerator diversion, and it runs parallel to an American one. In March, US prosecutors unsealed charges against Super Micro co-founder Yih-Shyan “Wally” Liaw and two others over an alleged $2.5 billion scheme to divert US-assembled servers to China during 2024 and 2025. The Taiwan indictment covers different defendants and a different set of shipments, but the same hardware category and the same destination.
Neither case describes a technical circumvention. US export controls turn on where a chip is declared to be going, so the declaration is the thing that has to hold. In this instance a false end-user document moved 74 servers of restricted hardware before customs caught the next batch.
Enforcement has been widening around that gap. The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security opened a review this month of how Chinese firms reach restricted Nvidia chips remotely, renting capacity in third countries rather than importing hardware at all. Legal channels have been narrow enough to make either route attractive: Beijing only recently allowed ByteDance and Tencent to take delivery of H200s Washington had cleared months earlier, and then only through Hong Kong.
The B300 is a generation ahead of the H200s moving through approved channels, which is what makes the 74 that got through more consequential than the 56 Taiwan stopped.
Sources: Reuters, Investing.com, Taipei Times
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By the Control Plane Editorial Team