Supermicro co-founder arrested, charged over $2.5B Nvidia GPU sales to China

Summary

A co-founder of Supermicro is among three people charged with diverting servers fitted with Nvidia GPUs worth $2.5 billion to Chinese customers in violation of US export controls. The Department of Justice (DOJ) unsealed an indictment on Thursday naming Yih-Shyan "Wally" Liaw, along with two others connected with Supermicro, as defendants. It accuses them of conspiring to sell billions' worth of high-performance servers with GPUs to China, evading export controls through the use of false documents, dummy servers to mislead inspectors, and convoluted shipment schemes to disguise the true destination of the kit. Liaw is a co-founder and Senior Vice President of Business Development at the server maker, based in San Jose, California. The other two defendants are Ruei-Tsang "Steven" Chang, whom the DOJ says is a general manager in Supermicro's Taiwan office, and Ting-Wei "Willy" Sun, identified by the Feds as a third-party broker alleged to have worked with the others on the scheme. Liaw, a US citizen, and Sun, a Taiwanese national, are understood to be in custody, while Chang, also from Taiwan, remains at large. The DoJ said Liaw and Chang were both arrested yesterday. All three are charged with conspiring to violate the Export Controls Reform Act, conspiring to smuggle goods from the United States, and conspiring to defraud the United States. According to the DOJ, Liaw and Chang engaged key executives at a company based in Southeast Asia to place purchase orders with Supermicro for high-spec servers fitted with GPUs. Those servers were shipped to Supermicro's facilities in Taiwan, before being delivered to the Asian buyer. The filing goes on to allege that, after delivery, the defendants then arranged with the Asian intermediary for the systems to be repackaged in unmarked boxes, before they were shipped onward to their final destinations in China. The defendants along with executives at the Asian firm were said to have created false documents and records to ensure th...