On August 24, 2026, the Keelung District Prosecutors Office in Taiwan indicted eight people—including employees of NVIDIA Taiwan and sales staff at Supermicro's Taiwan subsidiary—on charges of breach of trust and document forgery, alleging they illegally exported Supermicro-made AI servers equipped with NVIDIA B300 GPUs to China. According to prosecutors, the buyer obtained sales approval for 130 units by falsely claiming they would be used in Taiwan. Of those, 74 units were later sent to China, while customs officials intercepted the remaining 56. NVIDIA's whitelist system, end-user statements, and on-site verification were all in place. Yet the indictment alleges that when the employees responsible for approvals at the companies involved concealed information, those controls were circumvented.
The prosecutors' press release headline reads "nine indicted," but only eight defendants face charges related to the illegal export. The ninth person was charged separately over misappropriation of assets from a sales distributor. The indictment reflects the prosecution's allegations; guilt has not been established.
On-site checks were required for orders of eight or more units—yet the 130-unit order still went through
The sales review process described by the Keelung prosecutors was not something completed with a single document. To purchase B300-equipped servers, buyers had to pass NVIDIA's screening and be placed on a whitelist. Buyers declared the end use and end user, and the review proceeded sequentially through Supermicro's Taiwan subsidiary, NVIDIA Taiwan, and the headquarters of both companies. For purchases of eight units or more, sales and technical staff were required to visit the installation site and physically verify the facilities.
According to prosecutors, executives at the Taiwanese buyer company co-opted staff involved in this approval chain. A sales employee at Supermicro's Taiwan subsidiary allegedly disclosed the review procedures, while an executive at the sales distributor allegedly concealed doubts about the buyer's financial capacity by advancing payment on the buyer's behalf. Data center staff are said to have presented what was actually a quotation as a lease agreement and made the facility appear operational.
During an on-site inspection conducted on September 10, 2025, the racks, power supply, and network bandwidth of the leased space were clearly insufficient to run 130 units. Even so, prosecutors allege that the defendants at NVIDIA Taiwan and Supermicro's Taiwan subsidiary concealed this fact and misled other staff at both companies who were unaware of the scheme. The end-user statement listed the installation country as "Taiwan" and included a pledge not to export or re-export the equipment to entities under U.S. sanctions.
The defendant who handled sales partnerships at NVIDIA Taiwan reportedly emailed headquarters stating that the on-site inspection had been completed and requesting approval for the order. Keelung prosecutors describe this individual as the central figure who pushed through approval for the B300 GPU sale, alleging deliberate concealment of the buyer's insufficient funds and the fact that a Chinese company was the actual source of payment. Multiple verification steps existed. But when internal staff who all wanted the same order to succeed reinforced one another's explanations, the checks stopped functioning as independent verification.
The process for checking a buyer's creditworthiness and the process for confirming the installation site were, in principle, meant to catch different kinds of errors independently. Yet according to the indictment, the sales distributor bypassed the financial review, the data center backed up the facility inspection, and staff at the manufacturer and the GPU company pushed the approval through. Having many checkpoints does not increase safety if they all trace back to the same source of information.
A route to China split into shipments of 2, 64, and 64 units
The approved 130 units were delivered in three stages: 2, 64, and 64 units. The initial 2 units were resold to a different Chinese customer after the original buyer became unable to pay. Combined with the second batch of 64 units, prosecutors say these were shipped directly to China or routed through Indonesia between January 20 and February 12, 2026.
In the third stage of 64 units, 8 were sent to Japan and allegedly reached China via Hong Kong on April 11. The remaining 56 units were also scheduled for export to Japan, but Taiwanese customs detected irregularities. Customs required an export license for strategic high-tech cargo, and the parties reportedly applied using materials pieced together from Supermicro's website—but investigators seized the servers before the license was granted.
The outcome: of the 130 units, 74 reached China, while 56 were stopped in Taiwan. Keelung prosecutors calculated that the two alleged ringleaders earned $21,205,531 in profit from the resale and export of the 74 units, after deducting procurement costs. Two sales employees at Supermicro's Taiwan subsidiary reportedly received performance bonuses of $62,804 and $83,872, respectively.
Keelung prosecutors said the illegal export was uncovered by prosecutors and the Coast Guard's Keelung Investigation Squad while investigating an unrelated case, after which the Investigation Bureau and police joined the widening probe. On May 20, authorities searched 12 locations including residences and companies, and during a third round of searches on July 24, questioned an NVIDIA Taiwan employee. In total, investigators conducted three rounds of searches and detained seven people.
Different defendants, different deals from the $2.5 billion U.S. case
Regarding the diversion of AI servers to China, the U.S. Department of Justice also indicted three individuals—including a Supermicro co-founder—on March 19, 2026. According to the DOJ, a Southeast Asian company involved with the defendants purchased approximately $2.5 billion worth of servers between 2024 and 2025. The proportion of total purchases diverted to China was not disclosed. However, the DOJ alleges that over a short window from late April to mid-May 2025, at least $510 million worth of equipment was diverted to China.
The methods alleged in the U.S. case differ from those in the Taiwan case. The DOJ alleges the defendants lined up thousands of non-functioning dummy servers, relabeled with swapped serial numbers, to deceive auditors. The actual units had already been shipped to China, leaving only an audit-ready facade in the warehouse.
The Taiwan and U.S. cases share certain features—the diversion of Supermicro-made servers to China and the staging of facilities for audits. However, the defendants, the transactions involved, and the investigating agencies differ. The $2.5 billion figure from the U.S. case cannot be treated as the scale of the 130-unit transaction charged in Taiwan. Nor has the U.S. indictment been established as fact in a criminal trial; the defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty.
What an internal investigation's "management didn't know" leaves unresolved
On August 20—just days before the Taiwan indictment—Supermicro announced the results of an independent investigation launched in response to the March U.S. case. Overseen by independent directors, the review involved outside legal counsel and a forensic accounting advisory firm examining the transactions at issue and certain customers for regulated products. The investigation reportedly found no evidence that current company executives knew of the diversion scheme or its execution, nor evidence that the company knowingly sold directly to sanctioned entities.
At the same time, the company took personnel actions—including terminations—against employees in sales, technical support, and business development for failing to follow internal policy or the code of conduct. The board adopted all recommendations to strengthen export controls, and the company says it will continue cooperating with government authorities.
This investigation was conducted by outside experts retained by the company itself, not by investigators or a court. Its scope was also limited primarily to transactions related to the March U.S. indictment, and it does not refute the full scope of the Taiwan indictment announced four days later. In Taiwan, it was not NVIDIA or Supermicro as corporate entities that were indicted, but individuals who worked at the two companies' Taiwan operations.
What manufacturers need to verify in light of this case is not the number of review steps, but whether each check draws on an independent source of information. If the buyer's source of funds, the power and bandwidth at the installation site, and the whereabouts of equipment after export all rely on explanations from the same sales chain, then both the whitelist and the on-site inspection can fail in tandem. Beyond how much of the indictment holds up in court, whether NVIDIA and Supermicro implement verification independent of the approving staff will be a key measure of whether this can be prevented from happening again.