US arrests tech CEO accused of smuggling $300M in Nvidia chips into China

The US has arrested another person accused of helping move export-controlled Nvidia chips into China, this time by way of high-end servers and a paper trail that prosecutors say was fake. On Thursday, the Justice Department said 38-year-old Greg Lui used false paperwork to disguise shipments worth more than $300 million that were allegedly bound for China all along.

Lui is the CEO of Earthmade Computer, and the FBI’s indictment says he worked with freight-forwarding firms in places such as Malaysia and Singapore to reroute the hardware. The chips named in the case include Nvidia’s A100 and H100 GPUs. Those are not Nvidia’s most advanced chips, but they are powerful enough to handle large data sets and train large language models.

That’s the point. The US has spent years tightening export controls around advanced AI hardware because officials worry that a large enough supply could help China speed up its AI work or strengthen military capabilities. This case suggests the controls are only as good as the shipping chain, and the shipping chain has plenty of places to hide a lie.

The arrest also shows how these disputes are no longer about one chip at a time. They’re about servers, freight firms, and the paperwork in between — the dull stuff that makes the whole system work, until it doesn’t.