Greg Lui, the owner of Earthmade Computer Inc., has been arrested in the US for smuggling AI servers containing Nvidia chips to China—a shipment valued at $300 million—Bloomberg reports. The equipment was routed through Malaysia and Singapore, from where it was illegally re-exported.
Federal prosecutors in the US have arrested California resident Greg Lui on charges of smuggling computer servers containing Nvidia Corp. artificial intelligence chips worth $300 million to China, according to Bloomberg.
Lui is the owner of the private company Earthmade Computer Inc. He was detained upon arriving at work. The businessman faces charges of conspiracy to violate the Export Control Reform Act, smuggling, and conspiracy to launder money.
According to investigators, between 2023 and 2024, Lui supplied servers equipped with high-end Nvidia chips to Chinese customers. Prosecutors state that Lui acted in concert with a group of unidentified individuals.
Such operations required special licenses from the US government, which were never sought. The equipment was routed through Malaysia and Singapore, from where it was illegally re-exported.
In recent years, Washington has sought to restrict Beijing’s access to advanced AI hardware, while China has been developing its own capabilities and seeking workarounds.
In 2022, the US government imposed licensing restrictions on the export of Nvidia products to China and Russia. These restrictions apply, in particular, to GPU-based accelerators in the A100 and H100 series used for artificial intelligence tasks. In January, the US administration authorized Nvidia to export powerful AI chips—including the H200—to China. However, the company must confirm it has a sufficient supply of the chips available for sale.
The Information previously reported that Beijing was considering approving purchases of specific Nvidia graphics processing units for the country’s major tech companies, including ByteDance and Alibaba.
In early September, The New York Times reported that Inspur, a Chinese tech company on the US blacklist, had sold advanced American technology—including Nvidia chips—in violation of sanctions. Aivres, Inspur’s US subsidiary, played a key role in the scheme.
About the Author
