NVIDIA CorporationNvidia employee charged with smuggling advanced chips to China, violating export controls.
An Nvidia employee has been charged in Taiwan with smuggling advanced AI chips into China in the first known indictment of a worker at the US chipmaker over illegal exports. Taiwan's Keelung District Prosecutors' Office charged nine people, including employees of server maker Super Micro Computer, with illegally selling high-end AI servers to Chinese customers. Prosecutors described a Taiwan-based senior manager at Nvidia surnamed Zhang as the central figure in a scheme involving 130 of the chipmaker's flagship B300 servers, of which 74 were ultimately shipped to Chinese customers either directly from Taiwan or routed through Indonesia or Japan, while the remaining 56 were stopped by Taiwan customs officials. They alleged that defendants falsely claimed the servers would be used in a data centre in Taiwan even though its electricity supply and network bandwidth were insufficient to operate them, and that Zhang deliberately concealed that the funds used to purchase the servers actually came from a Chinese company. Prosecutors have requested the statutory maximum sentence of five years in prison for Zhang and three other defendants, while the other five were recommended for shorter terms.
NVIDIA CorporationNvidia employee charged with smuggling advanced chips to China, violating export controls.
Super Micro Computer IncSuper Micro employees charged in same scheme of illegally selling high-end AI servers to Chinese customers.