US charges a California man over $300 million of Nvidia-server smuggling to China

The US Department of Justice announced charges against Greg Lui, a California businessman, accusing him of smuggling more than $300 million worth of export-controlled computer servers containing Nvidia GPUs to China between 2023 and 2024. Prosecutors said Lui ran the scheme through his company, Earthmade Computer Inc, based in City of Industry, California, and arrested him on 1 October following a grand jury indictment returned two days earlier.

According to the indictment, Lui’s company bought the servers from US manufacturers using paperwork that falsely declared permissible destinations, then routed the equipment through Malaysia and Singapore before it reached buyers in China — a transshipment pattern that avoids the licensing checks tied to shipping directly to China. The Justice Department said Earthmade received more than $176 million from Malaysian shipping companies between January and October 2024 alone, with individual purchase orders running as high as roughly $7.6 million for 27 servers.

Lui faces three charges: conspiring to violate the Export Control Reform Act, smuggling, and conspiring to commit money laundering, carrying maximum sentences of 20, 10 and 20 years respectively — up to 50 years if he is convicted on all three. None of the underlying allegations has yet been tested at trial.

The case supplies one of the individual prosecutions behind a pattern researchers have separately tried to measure in aggregate. Epoch AI’s analysis of Malaysian trade data, published the previous month, had estimated a far larger scale of chip diversion through the same transshipment route using mismatches between countries’ declared export and import values, without identifying any individual case — complementing an earlier Epoch estimate that put total smuggled compute at roughly a third of China’s AI chip stock.