The U.S. Justice Department has charged three Super Micro Computer employees with illegally shipping at least $2.5 billion worth of advanced #Artificial Intelligence servers to China, violating U.S. export controls. U.S. officials didn’t name the specific chips involved, though Nvidia commands a dominant share of the AI chip market.
One of those charged is Supermicro’s co-founder and board member Yih-Shyan “Wally” Liaw. Supermicro said the alleged conduct “is a contravention of the Company’s policies and compliance controls” and the company has been “cooperating fully with the government’s investigation.”
Prosecutors said the defendants and their co-conspirators installed thousands of hollow, non-functioning server replicas at warehouses in order to deceive U.S. companies’ compliance teams, while the actual chips were already en route to China. The DOJ said that the defendants used dryers to remove labels from the machines, citing a surveillance video tape. #🇨🇳 ChinA.I. 🤖🧠🦾🤖
Chip smugglers have been using such tactics for years.
https://www.justice.gov/u..