Federal prosecutors arrested the co-founder of Super Micro, one of the world's largest makers of server and data-center hardware, for allegedly smuggling Nvidia AI chips to China through a front company in Southeast Asia. Yih-Shyan Liaw and two others (Ruei-Tsang Chang, a manager in Super Micro's Taiwan office, and Ting-Wei Sun, an outside contractor) were all charged, Forbes reports.
The alleged sales total roughly $2.5 billion since 2024. All three face charges of violating export control law and conspiracy to defraud the United States.
Liaw personally holds about $464 million in Super Micro shares. The company put him and Chang on administrative leave and so far has avoided being named as a defendant. The stock cratered 25.3% in premarket trading anyway, wiping roughly $4.7 billion off its market cap in a single morning.
Super Micro builds the server racks that house Nvidia GPUs in data centers worldwide. Liaw allegedly used the very supply chain he helped create to get around the export controls it was supposed to follow.
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