Byron Wan@Byron_Wan
🚨 Mar 19: an indictment was unsealed charging Yih-Shyan “Wally” Liaw (廖益賢), Ruei-Tsang “Steven” Chang (張瑞滄), and Ting-Wei “Willy” Sun (孫廷偉), for allegedly conspiring to divert high-performance computer servers assembled in the US and integrating sophisticated US AI technology (from Nvidia) to China, in violation of US export controls laws. Liaw, a US citizen, and Sun, a citizen of Taiwan, were arrested today and will be presented in the Northern District of California. Chang, a citizen of Taiwan, remains a fugitive.
Liaw is a co-founder, board member, and Senior Vice President of Business Development of Super Micro Computer, a US-based manufacturer that designs and builds high-performance computer servers for AI and cloud computing applications including servers that integrate AI GPUs. Chang is a general manager in Super Micro’s Taiwan office. Sun is a third-party broker and “fixer” who has worked with Liaw, Chang, and others to divert US-export controlled technology to China. Together, the defendants and others conspired to systematically divert Super Micro’s servers with Nvidia GPUs to China without a license to do so from 🇺🇸 Department of Commerce.
The scheme operated as follows. Liaw and Chang, who worked closely with third-party brokers with customers based in China, directed certain executives of a company based in Southeast Asia (“Company-1”) to place purchase orders with Super Micro for servers with certain GPUs, purportedly for Company-1. Those servers were often assembled in the US and shipped to Super Micro’s facilities in Taiwan, then delivered to Company-1 elsewhere in Southeast Asia. Company-1, in consultation with the defendants, then used a shipping and logistics company to repackage Super Micro’s servers and place them in unmarked boxes to conceal their content prior to shipping them to their final destinations in China. To ensure that these server allocations were approved internally at Super Micro, the defendants and executives at Company-1 prepared false documents and records, and transmitted false communications, purporting to show that Company-1 was the end user of the servers.
At the defendants’ direction, between 2024 and 2025, Company-1 purchased ~$2.5B worth of servers from Super Micro, many of which were assembled in the US. The defendants’ scheme became more brazen over time and resulted in massive quantities of servers with controlled US AI technology being sent to China. Between late April 2025 and mid-May 2025 alone, at least ~$510 million worth of Super Micro’s servers, assembled in the US, were diverted to China in violation of US export control laws as part of the defendants’ scheme.
The defendants and their co-conspirators took extensive measures to conceal their scheme. As just one example, to deceive Super Micro’s compliance team, responsible for ensuring adherence to US export control laws, the defendants staged thousands of “dummy” servers — non-working, physical replicas of Super Micro’s servers — for inspection at the locations where Company-1 was purportedly storing the servers it had purchased from Super Micro. However, the actual servers purchased by Company-1 from Super Micro had already been unlawfully shipped to China.
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justice.gov/opa/pr/three-c…
ir.supermicro.com/news/news-deta…
storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco…
