A senior vice president of Super Micro Computer Inc. and two others affiliated with the company were charged on Thursday (March 19, 2026) with conspiring to smuggle billions of dollars of computer servers containing advanced Nvidia chips to China.
The men violated U.S. export controls laws by scheming to divert massive quantities of the high-performance servers assembled in the United States to China between 2024 and 2025, according to the indictment in Manhattan federal court.
In a release, FBI Assistant Director in Charge James C. Barnacle Jr. said the defendants used fabricated documents, staged bogus equipment to pass audit inventories and utilised a pass-through company to conceal their misconduct and true clientele list.
U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton said schemes such as this “pose a direct threat to U.S. national security.”
U.S.-China AI race
