Super Micro smuggling co-conspirator pleads guilty to sending AI chips to China
Ting-Wei "Willy" Sun, one of the three people charged of smuggling Super Micro servers with advanced Nvidia AI chips to China, has pleaded guilty, with sentencing set for September of next year.
Ting-Wei "Willy" Sun, a third-party broker and "fixer" charged alongside Super Micro co-founder Yih-Shyan "Wally" Liaw and sales manager Ruei-Tsang "Steven" Chang, has pleaded guilty to the conspiracy to illegally divert Nvidia AI chips to China. According to Bloomberg, Sun's plea is part of an agreement with prosecutors, but details of any potential cooperation deal remain undisclosed.
The sentencing for Sun is scheduled for September 8, 2027. The case came to light after it was discovered that the trio diverted Super Micro servers containing Nvidia chips to China. They allegedly sent the servers to a Southeast Asian company, which then fabricated the paperwork and created dummy servers for inspectors. Workers then removed the serial numbers from the real servers and transferred them to the dummy server shells to complete the deception, while the actual servers were shipped to China.
Investigators found that the three used a Thailand-based corporation to receive the servers, which were delivered to Alibaba. Super Micro has denied any knowledge of the operation, even as it has generated $2.5 billion in sales since its 2024 inception. Liaw has pleaded not guilty and was released on a $5 million bond, with his trial set for November 2.
Chang is still at large. Taiwanese authorities are also investigating the illegal shipment of AI chips to China, including raids on Super Micro offices and the homes of six individuals. The company denies the raids, stating it cooperated with the police and provided access to the employees' workstations and gadgets. Taiwan has indicted nine more people involved in the illegal smuggling of Nvidia B300 GPUs.
Sun's guilty plea is part of the U.S.'s crackdown on illegal AI chip exports, following another tech CEO's arrest for smuggling $300 million in Nvidia AI servers to China. These cases highlight the White House's determination to safeguard its hardware edge over Beijing in the AI competition, even as AI development faces challenges domestically.
Written by urgent.news from Tom's Hardware's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
