Super Micro smuggling co-conspirator pleads guilty to sending AI chips to China

Ting-Wei “Willy” Sun, a third-party broker and “fixer” who’s been charged alongside Super Micro co-founder Yih-Shyan “Wally” Liaw and sales manager Ruei-Tsang “Steven” Chang for conspiring to unlawfully divert Nvidia AI chips to China, has pleaded guilty to the allegations against him. According to Bloomberg, Sun’s plea comes as part of an agreement with prosecutors, although the details of any possible cooperation arrangement remain undisclosed. Sun is also expected to be sentenced on Sept. 8, 2027, after entering his plea.

The case against the individuals was revealed earlier this year after it was discovered that they diverted Super Micro servers containing Nvidia chips to China. The three were reported to have sent the servers to a Southeast Asian company, which then proceeded to fake the paperwork and create dummy servers for inspectors. Workers then used hair dryers to remove the serial numbers on the real servers to transfer them to the dummy server shells to complete the illusion, while the real servers made their way to China. Further investigation revealed that the three used a Thailand-based corporation to receive the servers, which were then delivered to Alibaba, even as the Chinese tech giant denied receiving the banned Nvidia hardware.

Super Micro has also denied any knowledge of the operation, even as it has netted $2.5 billion in sales since it started in 2024. Nevertheless, the company’s shareholders have sued it, accusing it of concealing its dependence on illicit sales to China. Liaw, on the other hand, has pleaded not guilty to the charges and was released on a $5 million bond. The Super Micro co-founder is set to go to trial this coming Nov. 2, even as the third co-conspirator, Chang, remains a fugitive.

Taiwanese authorities are also building their own case against the illegal shipment of AI chips to China, with the investigators raiding some Super Micro offices and the homes of six individuals. The company, on the other hand, denied that its premises were raided, insisting that it cooperated with the police and provided access to the workstations and gadgets of the employees that were being investigated. It also said that it has been collaborating with both U.S. and Taiwanese authorities over the smuggling investigation, and that it has even fired several employees after completing its own independent investigation. Soon after this, Taiwan indicted nine more people involved in the illegal smuggling of Nvidia B300 GPUs.

Sun’s guilty plea is the latest development in the U.S.’s clampdown on illegal AI chip exports, which happened soon after another tech CEO was arrested in California for smuggling $300 million in Nvidia AI servers to China. These cases show how serious the White House is about protecting its hardware advantage over Beijing in the AI race, even as AI development is facing its own challenges at home.

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