Super Micro-linked contractor pleads guilty in a $2.5bn Nvidia chip-smuggling scheme

Ting-Wei “Willy” Sun, a contractor linked to Super Micro Computer, pleaded guilty in a Manhattan federal court to four counts arising from a scheme prosecutors say diverted about $2.5 billion worth of AI servers containing Nvidia B200, H100 and H200 chips to China. Sun admitted conspiring to violate US export controls, to smuggle goods, to defraud the government and to obstruct justice.

Prosecutors said the scheme ran from around October 2023, routing servers through intermediaries to obscure their final destination. As part of covering the diversion, Sun helped stage “dummy” servers in December 2025 and made false statements to a Commerce Department official during an inspection intended to verify that previously exported equipment remained in its declared location — equipment that had, by then, already reached China.

Sun was charged alongside two others in March 2026: Yih-Shyan “Wally” Liaw, a Super Micro co-founder who joined the company’s board in 2023, and Ruei-Tsang “Steven” Chang, a sales manager at Super Micro’s Taiwan office. Neither co-defendant has resolved their charges; Super Micro itself was not named as a defendant and has said the case has had no impact on its operations. Sentencing for Sun has not yet been scheduled in the reporting available.

The case is one of several chip-diversion prosecutions working their way through US courts this year, running alongside separate attempts by researchers to measure the scale of the pattern. Earlier in October, the Justice Department separately charged a California businessman over an unrelated $300 million transshipment scheme routed through Malaysia and Singapore — a different case, but evidence of the same broader enforcement push against routes that move restricted Nvidia hardware into China via third countries. None of the allegations against the co-defendants who have not entered pleas has yet been tested at trial.