US authorities have arrested California business owner Greg Lui on charges of smuggling around $300 million worth of Nvidia AI hardware to China without export licenses. Both reports say he used his company, Earthmade Computer Inc, to order servers containing high-end Nvidia GPUs and routed them through Malaysia and Singapore before final delivery to Chinese buyers, including the Chinese government.
The two outlets agree on the basic scheme: false paperwork misrepresented the final destination, and transshipment companies in Malaysia helped conceal the true end users. The Register adds specific GPU models (A100, H100, RTX 4090, RTX 5090) and says the scheme ran from October 2023 to August 2026; Tom's Hardware gives a shorter timeline of 2023 to 2024.
The main discrepancy is the potential sentence. The Register says Lui faces one count each of Export Control Reform Act and Export Administration Regulations violations, outbound smuggling, and money laundering, with a maximum of 50 years. Tom's Hardware describes the charges as conspiracy counts and reports a maximum of 20 years. Both note the case is part of broader US enforcement against AI chip diversions to China.