The owner of a California company was arrested on Thursday on charges of smuggling Nvidia equipment to China without the required export licences. According to The Register, 38-year-old Greg Lui is accused of attempting to export around $300 million worth of Nvidia products typically used in artificial intelligence development through US freight companies and Malaysian transshipment operators. Prosecutors allege that Lui used his company, Earthmade Computer Inc, to order products in the US — servers with powerful Nvidia components, including A100, H100, PNY GeForce RTX 4090 and GeForce RTX 5090 GPUs. He then shipped them to Malaysia and Singapore, countries for which Commerce Department licences are not required, and companies there forwarded the cargo to China to circumvent US export controls.
The scheme and the charges
According to court documents, the scheme began around October 2023 and continued until at least 12 August 2026. Prosecutors say Lui received more than $176 million from two Malaysian transshipment companies and, in return, introduced them to US companies capable of supplying Nvidia equipment, acting as an intermediary in equipment sales worth nearly $300 million.
The US government alleges that Lui was fully aware of the legal consequences of his actions and knew that US export laws restricted shipments of advanced Nvidia chips to China to licence holders. Court documents state that US authorities obtained paperwork linking Earthmade to an order for 92 servers exported from San Francisco International Airport to Kuala Lumpur. The documents also identify a Chinese customer as the recipient of the onward shipment from Malaysia to Hong Kong.
The indictment alleges that Lui instructed a US front company to enter false information in the paperwork about the cargo’s recipient — a certain Jackie Lui, purportedly the chief executive of “Topmost”, a company registered in California by the chief technology officer of one of the Malaysian transshipment businesses. Prosecutors also say that in 2021 Lui illegally acquired identity documents used in the scheme.
The authorities’ response and potential sentence
Lui faces one count relating to violations of the Export Control Reform Act and the Export Administration Regulations, as well as one count of export smuggling and money laundering. Together, these carry a maximum sentence of 50 years in prison.
“The FBI investigation found that Lui allegedly sold hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of American Super Intelligence technology to the Chinese government in clear violation of US export control laws,” said Roman Rozhavsky, assistant director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence and Espionage Division. He said that controls on exports of advanced SI technology are critical to national security and protecting the homeland, and that the FBI would continue to fight for American businesses and economic security.
John A. Eisenberg, assistant attorney general for national security, called SI the defining technology of the era and said that the National Security Division would protect America’s advantage in the chips that power this technology against illegal diversion by the United States’ economic and military adversaries.
The Register has contacted Earthmade and Nvidia for comment.
Source: www.theregister.com – Articles
