A high-stakes game of corporate cat-and-mouse has ended in federal handcuffs following the arrest of a Super Micro Computer co-founder.
Yih-Shyan “Wally” Liaw, a pillar of the $18.5 billion server giant, stands accused of leading a sophisticated conspiracy to funnel restricted American artificial intelligence technology into China.
Yih-Shyan “Wally” Liaw is Super Micro’s co-founder and senior VP, arrested for allegedly smuggling US AI-powered servers to China.
The scale of the alleged operation is staggering, involving roughly $2.5 billion worth of high-performance servers equipped with Nvidia’s most sought-after chips.
While the US government has spent years tightening the net around sensitive tech exports, prosecutors say this trio managed to weave a "tangled web of lies" to bypass national security blocks right under the nose of internal auditors.
Source: X
The indictment unsealed on 19 March 2026 names three primary figures.
At the top is Liaw, the company’s senior vice president of business development and a board member who holds nearly $464 million in shares.
Working alongside him were Ruei-Tsang “Steven” Chang, a sales manager based in Taiwan, and Ting-Wei “Willy” Sun, a contractor described by authorities as a "fixer."
While Liaw and Sun were apprehended and are set to face a judge in California, Chang remains a fugitive.
The US Department of Justice has been clear that although the individuals face severe charges, including conspiracy to violate the Export Control Reform Act, Super Micro as an entity has not been charged and is currently cooperating with the FBI.
The mechanics of the operation relied on a "pass-through" strategy involving a middleman company in Southeast Asia.
This firm would place massive orders for servers integrated with high-end GPUs, appearing as the final customer on paper.
Once the hardware arrived from the US or Taiwan, workers at a logistics firm would allegedly strip away identifying marks and repackage the servers into anonymous boxes for their final trip to China.
Workers use a hair dryer in a warehouse to peel off and reapply serial number stickers and other labels on dummy servers prepared for compliance testing. (Source: justice.gov)
Between 2024 and 2025, this pipeline moved billions in hardware.
The pace reached a fever pitch in mid-2025, with over $510 million in sales recorded in a single month-long window between April and May.
To keep the lucrative trade alive, the defendants allegedly went to extreme lengths to deceive both internal compliance teams and US export officers.
When auditors scheduled inspections to verify the location of the equipment, the conspirators reportedly staged "dummy" servers, non-working replicas, at storage facilities in Southeast Asia.
Dummy servers staged in a warehouse leased by Company-1 for an August 2025 audit by the U.S. Manufacturer. (Source: justice.gov)
This allowed them to claim the technology was still in a permitted region while the real, functional units were already powering data centres in China.
Chang allegedly took charge of steering "friendly" auditors away from sensitive areas, ensuring the charade remained intact while the trio pressured their own compliance department to approve even more shipments.
The urgency of the smuggling ring was driven by the global race for generative AI dominance.
Liaw was reportedly obsessed with securing the latest hardware, specifically pushing for Nvidia's B200 chips which use the advanced Blackwell architecture.
In a series of 2024 text messages to an executive at the Southeast Asian firm, Liaw wrote,
“Roughly how many you can take by January? Feb? March? April? Just roughly forecast will be fine ... . Then we can propose to [Nvidia] with the way they can accept ... . This is the only way to have [Nvidia] to promise the B200 allocation so far as I know.”
Even as US-China tensions rose, Liaw allegedly urged his partners to accelerate shipments before new White House restrictions could take effect.
The fallout was immediate for Super Micro’s market value, with share prices tumbling over 10% to $27.14 in after-hours trading.
Source: X
The company has since placed the implicated employees on leave and severed ties with the contractor, insisting the alleged crimes were a "contravention of the Company's policies."
For the individuals involved, the legal stakes are high.
Charges of smuggling and defrauding the government carry significant weight, with the export control violations alone carrying a maximum prison term of 20 years.
As US Attorney Jay Clayton noted,
“Crimes involving sensitive technology must be met with swift action, otherwise the law is meaningless.”
U.S. authorities have arrested Yih-Shyan Liaw, co-founder of Super Micro Computer, Inc., in connection with an alleged multibillion-dollar scheme to circumvent export controls and funnel advanced artificial intelligence servers to China
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