Taiwan’s Keelung District Prosecutors’ Office indicted nine people Monday, including a manager at Nvidia’s Taiwan unit and employees of Super Micro Computer’s Taiwan subsidiary, accusing them of forging shipping documents to route AI servers loaded with restricted Nvidia chips to China. Because Taiwan has no standalone criminal statute covering illegal chip exports, prosecutors built the case entirely on breach-of-trust and document-forgery charges instead.
Eight of the nine defendants face those charges over the illegal export of 74 high-end servers fitted with Nvidia’s B300 graphics processors, a class of hardware barred from sale to Chinese buyers under U.S. rules. Prosecutors said 50 of the servers were routed through Indonesia, eight through Japan, and the remainder shipped directly to China; an additional 56 servers were intercepted at Taiwan’s border before they could leave the country. Three of the defendants also face embezzlement charges tied to more than $1 million diverted during the scheme. Several suspects are being held incommunicado, and one remains at large, according to Taiwan’s public broadcaster TaiwanPlus.
The defendants include two Super Micro employees, the Nvidia Taiwan manager, and staff from two other Taiwan-listed firms, Albatron Technology and Chief Telecom, prosecutors said. Nvidia and Super Micro both maintain strict controls meant to prevent exactly this kind of diversion: buyers must be on Nvidia’s approved customer list, submit documentation verifying who the end user is and how the hardware will be used, agree not to resell it, and accept on-site inspections for any order exceeding eight servers. Prosecutors allege the scheme began in February 2025, when two sales agents at a server reseller obtained a position on Nvidia’s approved-buyer list and lined up a Chinese purchaser, then used forged paperwork to obscure the servers’ true destination as they moved through the supply chain.
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Prosecutors said the defendants were seeking sentences of up to five years for seven of the accused, whom they described as “driven by the pursuit of exorbitant profits.” They are seeking more lenient terms for two others who confessed and cooperated with the investigation. In a statement, prosecutors said the scheme had raised corporate compliance costs and damaged Taiwan’s international standing, without elaborating on specifics.
The case is Taiwan’s first formal criminal action built around AI server smuggling, and it follows a monthslong investigation that began in May with the arrest of three initial suspects on forgery allegations. Investigators later raided Super Micro’s Taiwan office in late June along with the homes of six individuals and three affiliated company sites, and a Taipei court approved custody orders in early July for two senior Super Micro managers and an Albatron vice president. Super Micro’s US-listed shares fell 8% after news of the June raid broke, according to Bloomberg.
Taiwan’s investigation runs parallel to a U.S. federal case filed in March, in which prosecutors charged Super Micro co-founder Yih-Shyan “Wally” Liaw and two associates with conspiring to divert roughly $2.5 billion worth of Nvidia-powered servers, including banned H200 and B200 models, to China between 2024 and 2025 without the export licenses required by the U.S. Commerce Department. Super Micro itself was not charged in that case and said it was cooperating with investigators while placing implicated employees on leave or ending their employment.
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Nvidia said in a statement that its employees have “every incentive to work diligently with customers to ensure compliance with all applicable laws,” and that it would work with Taiwanese authorities to resolve the allegations. Super Micro said its own cooperation with investigators led directly to the arrests of the individuals now indicted, and that the company itself “is not a target of their investigation and has not been accused of any wrongdoing.”
The absence of a Taiwanese law criminalizing chip exports to China has drawn criticism from lawmakers and legal experts, who argue the gap is especially significant given that Taiwan, home to chipmaking giant TSMC, produces the overwhelming majority of the world’s most advanced semiconductors. Democratic Progressive Party legislator Chung Chia-pin has drafted an amendment to Taiwan’s Foreign Trade Act that would add explicit language covering exports of mainland China-bound semiconductor chips, though the measure has not yet passed. Washington, meanwhile, has restricted exports of its most advanced AI chips to China since late 2022, with successive rounds of tightening, while still permitting sales of older-generation hardware such as the Nvidia H200.
Taiwan’s government continues to classify the island as a Tier 1 country under the U.S. AI Diffusion framework, meaning it faces no U.S. restrictions on receiving advanced chips directly — a status that puts Taipei’s prosecutors, not Washington’s, as the last line of enforcement once the hardware is already inside the country.
