Employees of a US computer company raked in billions of dollars by diverting Nvidia artificial intelligence chips to China in violation of export controls, according to an indictment unsealed Thursday.
Yih-Shyan “Wally” Liaw, 71, of Silicon Valley conspired with 53-year-old Ruei-Tsang “Steven” Chang and 44-year-old Ting-Wei “Willy” Sun of Taiwan to smuggle computer servers containing high-performance Nvidia (G PU graphics processing processors) into China.
“The defendants participated in a systematic scheme to divert massive amounts of US artificial intelligence technology to customers in China,” US Attorney Jay Clayton said in a statement.
“They did this through a tangled web of lies, obfuscation and cover-ups.”
The company that employed the three defendants, Super Micro Computer, said the employees violated its policies and controls with the scheme.
Yih-Shyan Liaw was a senior vice president of business development and on the company’s board of directors, Ruei-Tsang Chang was a sales manager in Taiwan and Ting-Wei Sun was a contractor, according to Super Micro.
“The company has cooperated fully with the government’s investigation and will continue to do so,” she said.
The trio conspired with others starting about two years ago to sell at least $2.5 billion worth of computer servers shipped to China despite U.S. export controls that prohibit their sale there without proper licenses, according to the indictment.
The scheme involved a “pass-through” company based in Southeast Asia used to obscure where servers packed with Nvidia GPUs were going, prosecutors say.
Forged documents were used to hide tracks to China, and malfunctioning “dummy” copy servers were kept in the warehouse to deceive auditors, according to the indictment.
Ting-Wei Sun was described in the filing as a “fixer” who worked with others to cover up the scheme.
