Analysis
Taiwan's Keelung District Prosecutors' Office indicted nine people on August 24 over an alleged scheme to illegally resell Super Micro AI servers equipped with Nvidia's advanced B300 GPUs to buyers in China, The Washington Post reported, corroborated by Bloomberg. The indictment names a distribution manager surnamed Chang at Nvidia's Taiwan office, two sales managers surnamed Lin and Wang at Super Micro's Taiwan branch, and the chief executive of Albatron Technology, a Super Micro distributor, among the nine defendants.
How the Scheme Worked
Prosecutors say two of the defendants submitted fraudulent documentation to clear a purchase of 130 AI servers, falsely indicating the machines would be installed at a Taiwanese facility. Of those 130 servers, 74 reached buyers in China through three separate routes -- 50 rerouted through Indonesia, 16 shipped directly, and 8 routed via Japan before reaching Hong Kong -- while Taiwan customs officials intercepted the remaining 56 after flagging irregularities in the paperwork.
- Nvidia (Taiwan office) -- a distribution manager surnamed Chang named among the nine defendants
- Super Micro (Taiwan branch) -- two sales managers surnamed Lin and Wang indicted
- Albatron Technology -- Super Micro distributor whose CEO is among those charged
- Buyers in mainland China -- the ultimate destination for 74 of the 130 servers involved
Part of a Broader Enforcement Push
This case follows a related US indictment: on March 19, 2026, the Justice Department unsealed charges against Super Micro co-founder Charles Liaw, alleging a separate scheme that diverted roughly $2.5 billion in server purchases through a Southeast Asian pass-through company between 2024 and 2025, with at least $510 million worth of servers diverted to China in a single three-week window in spring 2025. Taiwan's case and the US case aren't the same scheme, but together they show export-control enforcement around Nvidia's most advanced AI chips tightening on both sides of the Pacific at roughly the same time, involving employees inside both Nvidia's and Super Micro's own regional operations rather than only third-party resellers.
Nvidia's B300 GPUs sit at the top of the company's product stack, and US export controls have restricted sales of Nvidia's most advanced AI accelerators to China since 2022, tightening further in subsequent years. That restriction has created a persistent gray market for routing controlled chips through third countries -- Southeast Asia and, per this case, Taiwan itself -- a pattern regulators and prosecutors on both sides of the Pacific have been actively investigating for several years without fully closing off.
The Counterweight
The counterweight worth naming: an indictment is an allegation, not a conviction, and none of the nine defendants have yet had their case tried in a Taiwanese court. Nvidia and Super Micro are not themselves charged as companies -- the defendants are individual employees and a distributor executive, and both companies can plausibly argue the scheme operated without corporate authorization or knowledge, a defense that will likely shape how each company responds publicly. It's also worth noting that 56 of the 130 servers were caught before ever leaving Taiwan, evidence that at least some of Taiwan's existing export controls functioned as intended in this specific case, even as 74 got through.
Whether Taiwanese prosecutors or the US Commerce Department name additional intermediaries in the Indonesia and Japan/Hong Kong routing chains as the case proceeds is the open question -- multi-country transshipment schemes like this one typically involve more participants than a first indictment names.
