Taiwan indicts nine over Nvidia B300 servers smuggled to China

Taiwan's Keelung District Prosecutors' Office indicted nine people for rerouting 74 Nvidia B300 servers to Chinese buyers. Among the defendants: a partner manager at Nvidia's Taiwan office surnamed Chang, two sales managers at Super Micro's Taiwan branch surnamed Lin and Wang, and the chief executive of Albatron Technology, a Super Micro distributor.

The scheme, prosecutors say, dressed up 130 B300 servers as if they were headed for a rented facility inside Taiwan. 74 were routed on to Chinese customers instead. Of those, 50 were transhipped through Indonesia, eight through Japan, and the rest sent direct or via Hong Kong. Customs stopped the remaining 56 before they left.

The defendants "colluded with one another at various levels for enormous profit, illegally exporting high-end servers, increasing corporate compliance costs, and severely damaging our nation's international image," Keelung prosecutors said, adding that the group acted despite being "fully aware" of both companies' "rigorous" export control procedures. Charges include breach of trust, document forgery, and special breach of trust under the Securities and Exchange Act. Prosecutors are asking for 18 months to five years in prison, with the statutory maximum reserved for Chang and three other defendants they described as most involved.

Engadget notes that Taipei has held a stricter line on advanced AI hardware than Washington, even as the US eased curbs on older Nvidia parts like the H200; prior cases in the same enforcement pattern moved roughly $1 billion and $3.5 billion in equipment through Southeast Asia. It sits inside a steady run of China AI stories our tracker has logged over the last three months, alongside the 12.5 GW data-center buildout planned for Ulanqab that keeps mainland demand for this hardware climbing.

Digitimes headlined the story "How Nvidia's whitelist was beaten". The alleged scheme did not defeat a border check so much as an internal sales control, using false documents to move B300-class hardware through channels that were meant to be locked down.