The paper trail looked convincing enough: 130 of Nvidia's most powerful B300 AI servers, documented as installed and humming away inside a facility in Taiwan. In reality, prosecutors in the port city of Keelung allege, 74 of those machines had already been quietly delivered to customers in China, and 56 more were headed the same way before Taiwanese customs officials detected irregularities and intervened. On Monday, Taiwan's authorities confirmed that nine people had been indicted — reportedly including a senior Nvidia manager and two employees of server manufacturer Supermicro based in the country — on charges of breach of trust and document forgery. The arrests follow a March indictment in the United States of Supermicro co-founder Wally Liaw, who is accused of channelling approximately $2.

5 billion worth of restricted AI servers to China since 2024. Since 2022, any firm wishing to export advanced semiconductors to China has been required to obtain a US government licence — a policy designed to prevent Beijing from closing the gap with Washington in the global AI race. Taiwan launched its own parallel investigation after the Liaw case surfaced, and that probe has now swept through at least 12 locations across the island. A tenth suspect, linked to the alleged siphoning of funds from a distributor involved in supplying the restricted chips, remains at large.

Supermicro has stated that it is cooperating with Taiwanese investigators and is not itself a target of the current indictments. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who has publicly urged Supermicro to "fix" the problem, faces a sharper strategic dilemma: how to preserve Nvidia's substantial commercial ambitions in China while demonstrating to Washington that its supply chain is not being used as a conduit for weapons-relevant technology.