techknight

The co-founder of one of America's biggest AI companies just got arrested by the FBI. His name is Wally Liaw and he co-founded Super Micro Computer in 1993. He sat on the board and he personally held $464 million in company stock. And prosecutors say he spent the last two years secretly shipping America's most powerful AI chips straight to China. Not one shipment but a systematic, coordinated operation. The scheme ran through a Southeast Asian shell company. Fake documents, fake buyers, and servers repackaged mid-route to conceal their true destination. When US compliance auditors showed up to inspect the warehouses, the real servers were already gone. They had been replaced with fake "dummy" servers built specifically to fool inspectors. In just three weeks in spring 2025, they shipped $510 million worth of restricted Nvidia hardware. $2.5 billion in banned AI servers delivered to China and here's where it gets darker. This isn't just one rogue executive. A documentary crew already found the underground network months ago, GPU smugglers stripping chips out of banned graphics cards, modifying them in garages, shipping them one by one across borders. A US based buyer was caught in Arizona meeting a contact in a Prius, testing GPUs in a car, with a spare license plate in the trunk. Street-level smugglers, shell companies in Southeast Asia, and now a co-founder with board access and a $464M stake. It's the same black market but just operating at every level simultaneously. The US has spent years trying to cut China off from the chips that power military AI, surveillance, and weapons systems. Liaw and his co-conspirators allegedly made that effort meaningless from the inside. He faces up to 20 years under the Export Control Reform Act plus additional charges for smuggling and defrauding the United States. One of his co-conspirators is still a fugitive and SMCI stock dropped nearly 15% after hours. The company itself says it wasn't named in the indictment. But the co-founder who built it, sat on its board, and ran business development was apparently running something else entirely on the side.

When people ask about my favorite weather, it’s this. I crave this.

I have to make a video later showing off three of my great value laptops. I had in high school and elementary school. Great specs with plastic cheap frame. You’ll see why I can never recommend them

It is wild how times have changed in 30 years of chasing. When I started, getting yourself into a tornado was something you would be embarrassed about and the footage would never see the light of day. Not that that was a good thing, we missed opportunities to learn from others mistakes. Now there is a subset of chasers that routinely, and intentionally enter the debris cloud of strong to violent tornadoes, in regular vehicles, with no protection from missiles. And to be clear, I’m not taking shots at anyone, I’m just reflecting on how we reached this point and what is next.

Are you this old ?