Supermicro’s co-founder was just arrested for allegedly smuggling $2.5 billion in GPUs to China
Fortune • • general
Key Points:
- The Department of Justice unsealed an indictment charging Liaw, 71, Supermicro’s Taiwan GM Ruei-Tsang “Steven” Chang (fugitive), and Ting-Wei “Willy” Sun with conspiring to illegally divert billions of dollars’ worth of Supermicro AI servers to China, violating U.S. export control laws.
- The alleged scheme involved falsifying purchase orders through a Southeast Asian company to ship servers assembled in the U.S. to Taiwan, then covertly rerouting them to China in unmarked boxes, with fake documents and staged dummy servers used to deceive audits and compliance teams.
- The servers contained Nvidia GPU chips, which are subject to strict export controls due to national security concerns; Nvidia emphasized its commitment
