Trio of suspects could be in line for decades behind bars, fines, and asset forfeiture.
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Three Super Micro employees have been charged with conspiring to unlawfully divert cutting-edge U.S. artificial intelligence technology to China. An indictment unsealed on Thursday says Yih-Shyan “Wally” Liaw, Ruei-Tsang “Steven” Chang, and Ting-Wei “Willy” Sun were involved in a smuggling plot that leveraged a middleman Southeast Asian company to fake paperwork and repackage servers that were powered by cutting-edge Nvidia chips . The underhanded operation is thought to have netted roughly $2.5b in sales since 2024.
Super Micro isn’t named in the indictment, but Liaw is a co-founder of the server firm, with nearly half a billion dollars worth of shares under his belt (the shares just dropped 12% in value on this news). Moreover, Chang is a sales manager for Super Micro in Taiwan. Sun is referred to as a third-party broker and fixer who has worked with the other two at Super Micro previously. Liaw (71, a U.S. citizen), and Sun (44, Taiwan) have been arrested, but Chang (53, Taiwan) is currently a fugitive, notes the Justice Department PR.
Basically, billions of dollars of Nvidia-powered servers that shouldn’t have been available to Chinese customers were funneled to the country using a fake front company, which fabricated paperwork and assembled thousands of dummy servers, to fool inspectors. It was far from a casual or opportunistic operation, with a high level of coordinated deception.
You may like Former Chinese gaming company with China govt ties accused of smuggling banned AI GPUs Ten former Samsung employees arrested for industrial espionage charges for giving China chipmaker 10nm tech Former Google engineer convicted of stealing GPU and TPU trade secrets for 'Chinese interests' Despite the sophistication of the covert documentation, logistics, and supporting operations, some analysts have highlighted the brazen absurdity of the operation. For example, the indicted trio have been accused of maintaining a substantial inventory of thousands of dummy (empty shell) servers in Southeast Asia, supposedly awaiting deployment to local (not China-based) customers.
I'm sorry but this super micro thing is awful but parts of it are genuinely hilarious They literally used a hair dryer to move serial numbers from real servers to dummy servers to throw in a warehouse and got caught on camera pic.twitter.com/Ht9gBBF7aQ March 20, 2026
Analyst Max Weinbach highlights some CCTV image captures showing workers using hair dryers to transfer serial number stickers from genuine servers to the dummy server shells. They would subsequently ship the real GPU-packed servers to China.
Today, due to the ever-shifting sands of U.S. export controls policy, some of the smuggled Super Micro servers might be approved as exportable after following a framework to get a license.
Super Micro has acknowledged that the accused trio are “associated” with it, but highlights that the company isn’t named as a defendant in the indictment. The official statement says that it has “placed the two employees on administrative leave and terminated its relationship with the contractor, effective immediately.”
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- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/super-micro-employees-accused-of-smuggling-usd2-5-billion-worth-of-nvidia-hardware-to-china-perps-used-a-hairdryer-to-move-serial-numbers-between-real-hardware-and-thousands-of-dummy-servers#main
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