Taiwan indicts nine over AI servers with Nvidia chips diverted to China

Prosecutors in the Taiwanese port city of Keelung indicted nine people on 24 August 2026 over what they described as a scheme to divert artificial intelligence servers containing restricted Nvidia chips to buyers in China. The accused include a manager at Nvidia’s Taiwan office and two sales managers at the Taiwan branch of the US server maker Super Micro Computer, known as Supermicro.

The allegations have not been tested in court. Prosecutors identified the defendants by surname only, and neither Nvidia nor Supermicro was charged.

The alleged scheme

According to the Keelung District Prosecutors Office, the case concerns Supermicro servers fitted with Nvidia’s B300 graphics processors, hardware whose sale both companies strictly control. Taiwan’s Central News Agency (CNA) reported the rules as prosecutors set them out: a buyer must be on an approved list kept by Nvidia, must document who the end user is and must not resell, and any order of more than eight servers requires an inspection of the site where they will run.

Prosecutors allege that the defendants got round those checks with false paperwork. An order for 130 servers was presented as destined for a data centre run by Chief Telecom, a Taiwanese provider, which in fact lacked the electricity and bandwidth to operate them. That shortfall was concealed, prosecutors say, and the Nvidia manager, surnamed Chang, asked his company to approve the order on the grounds that verification was complete. Supermicro then agreed to sell.

Of the 130 servers, 74 ended up with Chinese buyers. Fifty were shipped through Indonesia and eight through Japan, and the rest went directly, prosecutors said. Customs officers seized the remaining 56 at Taiwan’s border. One suspect who remained at large was alleged to have received more than US$21.2 million from the resale of the 74 servers, CNA reported.

Charges and penalties

Eight defendants were charged with breach of trust and forging documents. Besides the Nvidia and Supermicro employees, they include the chief executive of Albatron Technology, a Taiwan-listed Supermicro distributor, a project manager at Chief Telecom and the heads of customs-clearance, trading and server-sales firms. Three people face additional charges over money allegedly siphoned from Albatron, among them a ninth defendant charged only in that related case.

Prosecutors asked for prison terms of up to five years for seven of the accused, whom they said were “driven by the pursuit of exorbitant profits”, the news agency AFP reported, and for more lenient sentences for two who confessed and cooperated. The conduct “not only increased corporate compliance costs but also severely damaged the nation’s international image”, the prosecutors’ statement said.

Why forgery, not export law

The United States has restricted exports of Nvidia’s most advanced chips to China since 2022. Taiwan makes the largest share of the world’s advanced AI chips, which puts the island at the centre of efforts to enforce those limits. But exporting such servers is not in itself a criminal offence under Taiwanese law, AFP noted, so prosecutors have had to rely on other statutes, such as those on breach of trust and forgery. Lawmakers and experts in Taiwan have said the law should be changed.

What the companies said

Nvidia said its employees have “every incentive to work diligently with customers to ensure compliance with all applicable laws” and that it would work with the Taiwanese authorities to resolve the allegations quickly, according to Al Jazeera, citing news agencies. Supermicro said its own cooperation with investigators had led to the arrests, including those of two former employees of its Taiwan subsidiary, and that the company “is not a target of their investigation and has not been accused of any wrongdoing”.

No trial date had been reported by early October 2026.