Taiwan’s Keelung District Prosecutors’ Office has indicted nine people over an alleged Nvidia B300 GPU smuggling operation that routed the AI accelerators, built into Supermicro servers, into China in breach of export controls. The indictment lands even as the US has eased its own restrictions on AI chip exports to China, which makes the case a reminder that relaxed federal rules haven’t closed off the black market for the highest-end silicon. Prosecutors describe a five-step scheme built to defeat a compliance system designed to track every unit sold.
Supermicro’s Taiwan subsidiary sells its B300 systems only to whitelisted buyers, who must sign an end-user agreement promising not to resell or re-export the GPUs to sanctioned parties, including customers in China. Order eight units or more and the deal is supposed to trigger an on-site inspection led by representatives from both companies, a check meant to confirm the hardware actually ends up where the paperwork says it will.
How the Nvidia B300 GPU smuggling scheme worked
Per the indictment, the Taiwanese server trading firm Flying Tiger Tech obtained whitelist status and then placed an order for 130 units, declaring itself the end user and stating the servers would be installed in Taiwan. The order wasn’t placed directly, it went through Albatron Technology, a listed Supermicro distributor on the Taiwan stock exchange. Tom’s Hardware reports that routing the order this way “kept Supermicro from ever examining where Flying Tiger’s money came from,” since a sale processed through an established, exchange-listed distributor doesn’t draw the same scrutiny as a direct order from an unfamiliar buyer.
That’s the mechanism at the centre of the case: a five-point structure that combined a legitimate whitelist entry, a false end-use declaration naming a Taiwan installation site, an order shaped to move through Supermicro’s own screening, and a recognised distributor as the paper trail, to shift hardware that was never supposed to leave Taiwan in the first place. None of the five points on its own would have raised a flag; stacked together, they got 130 units of restricted hardware past a system built specifically to catch this.
Where the two reports disagree
Coverage of the indictment doesn’t agree on who’s actually named. Engadget’s headline frames it as Nvidia employees exporting prohibited servers. The operational detail in the indictment names Supermicro’s Taiwan subsidiary, the trading firm Flying Tiger Tech and the distributor Albatron Technology, not any individual at Nvidia. Nvidia doesn’t appear to have sold or shipped anything directly in this account: the scheme worked by exploiting the paperwork of a whitelisted Taiwanese buyer and a listed distributor, a breach of Supermicro’s export controls rather than a confirmed breach involving Nvidia staff. “Nvidia employees” reads as one outlet’s framing, not a detail spelled out in the indictment.
The timing isn’t a coincidence either way. Tom’s Hardware notes the Keelung indictment landed just days after Supermicro disclosed that it had terminated several employees following its own internal investigation into US chip smuggling attempts. Whether that internal review and the nine people now indicted in Taiwan are part of the same thread hasn’t been confirmed by either company, and neither Supermicro nor Nvidia has said publicly whether the two cases are linked.
What to watch: the nine defendants now face prosecution in Taiwan, and it’s worth watching whether the case names further intermediaries beyond Flying Tiger Tech and Albatron Technology, or whether Supermicro’s internal review produces terminations beyond the ones it has already disclosed.
