Taiwan’s Keelung District Prosecutors’ Office on August 24, 2026 indicted nine people over the alleged illegal resale of Supermicro AI servers equipped with Nvidia’s advanced B300 GPUs to buyers in China, according to the prosecutors’ statement. The defendants include a distribution manager surnamed Chang at Nvidia’s Taiwan office, two sales managers surnamed Lin and Wang at the Taiwan branch of Supermicro Computer, and the chief executive of Albatron Technology, a Supermicro distributor, according to the prosecutors’ statement.
The case is the most detailed public account yet of how restricted U.S. AI hardware moves through Taiwan’s distribution chain to Chinese end users, and it lands five months after the U.S. Justice Department charged Super Micro co-founder Yih-Shyan “Wally” Liaw and two others in a parallel $2.5 billion diversion scheme.
The Three Transactions Prosecutors Laid Out
The indictment describes a sales channel that exists only because of export controls. Sales of Supermicro’s advanced AI servers with Nvidia B300 GPUs are strictly controlled by both companies: buyers must sit on Nvidia’s approved whitelist, submit end-user and end-use documentation for verification, and accept a no-resale condition. Any order above eight servers triggers site inspections by sales staff and technicians from both companies.
Prosecutors allege the scheme began in February 2025, when two men surnamed Chen at server sales company Flying Tiger Technology obtained a whitelist position and lined up a buyer. Knowing that Chief Telecom, the data center provider named in the paperwork, lacked the electrical capacity and bandwidth to house 130 servers, the defendants concealed that fact and had Chang tell Nvidia the required verification was complete, prosecutors said. That approval unlocked the sale of 130 servers to Flying Tiger.
The hardware then moved in stages. After Flying Tiger received the first two servers and its original buyer failed to pay, Albatron’s chief executive, surnamed Lu, allegedly referred the company to a Chinese buyer. A second transaction for 64 servers involved the head of trading company Long Wins, who prosecutors say learned of the hardware through Wang at Supermicro’s Taiwan branch; Wang allegedly acknowledged the illegal sale to his colleague Lin and agreed to split the proceeds with him. The 64 servers from that deal, plus the two from the first, reached Chinese buyers in three batches, 50 of them routed through Indonesia. In a third transaction for another 64 servers, eight were shipped through Japan and Hong Kong, and the remaining 56 were seized in Taiwan.
The Flying Tiger executive still at large received more than $21.2 million in illicit proceeds from the completed resale of 74 servers, prosecutors said. In a related case, the head of Quintai Electronics allegedly issued four false invoices to conceal the money flow, diverting about NT$39.16 million in Albatron assets. Ho, Lin and Lu face separate charges of aggravated breach of trust under Taiwan’s securities law; the nine principal defendants were charged with breach of trust and forgery.
The Parallel Case in Manhattan
Taiwan’s investigation runs alongside a U.S. prosecution with a strikingly similar anatomy. On March 19, 2026, the Justice Department unsealed an indictment charging Liaw, a Super Micro co-founder and board member, with conspiring to divert servers containing controlled GPUs to China without a Commerce Department license. The U.S. case alleges roughly $2.5 billion in server purchases by a Southeast Asian pass-through company between 2024 and 2025, with at least $510 million worth diverted to China in one three-week window in the spring of 2025.
The concealment methods mirror each other. Where the Taiwan indictment describes falsified verification and hidden capacity shortfalls, the U.S. indictment describes thousands of non-working “dummy” servers staged for compliance audits, with labels and serial number stickers transferred using a hair dryer, some of it captured on surveillance cameras. Liaw faces counts carrying up to 20 years on the export-control conspiracy charge; his co-defendant Ruei-Tsang Chang remains a fugitive.
The legal foundation both cases rest on is the U.S. licensing requirement: the Commerce Department has restricted exports of advanced AI accelerator chips, and servers containing them, to China and Hong Kong since 2022, on the stated determination that the hardware’s computing capability makes its transfer an unacceptable national security risk.
What the Indictment Shows About Enforcement
The two cases mark a shift in who bears legal exposure for diversion. The Taiwan indictment reaches inside the manufacturers’ own channel: a manager at the chip designer whose whitelist approval released the order, sales staff at the server maker who prosecutors say knew the destination and took a cut, and the chief executive of an authorized distributor who allegedly supplied the Chinese buyer.
The controls at issue are not paper obligations: they are whitelist approvals, end-use documentation, and physical site inspections, and the Taiwan case alleges each checkpoint was defeated from the inside rather than bypassed from the outside. Fifty-six servers from the third transaction never left Taiwan, seized by authorities before shipment; the remaining 74 that prosecutors traced across three transactions did reach China, through Indonesia, Japan, and Hong Kong.
