Supermicro’s co-founder and two others working for the company have been charged in New York for allegedly violating US export controls by smuggling $2.5bn of Nvidia’s AI chip servers to Chinese customers.
The US attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York said Wally Liaw, a co-founder and member of Supermicro’s board of directors, conspired with a Taiwan-based Supermicro employee and a contractor to co-ordinate illegal shipments of chips to China.
The announcement by New York’s top federal prosecutor Jay Clayton following an FBI investigation is by far the largest case yet by US law enforcement claiming that Nvidia’s chips are being smuggled into China via employees at one of its biggest server partners.