Although the US has relaxed its restrictions on NVIDIA AI chip exports to China, illegal exports apparently still take place. Prosecutors in Taiwan just indicted nine individuals, including NVIDIA and Super Micro employees, for illegally bringing AI servers into China, Reuters reported. 

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,” prosecutors from the northern city of Keelung said in a statement. They did this, the team added, despite being “fully aware” of NVIDIA and Super Micro’s “rigorous” export control procedures. 

Although NVIDIA is an American company, most of its chips are manufactured by the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the world’s largest chip maker by far. TSMC’s latest Blackwell AI chips are manufactured in Phoenix, Arizona, but are still shipped to Taiwan for advanced packaging prior to final assembly. 

The US has banned the sale of cutting-edge AI tech from NVIDIA and others to China since 2022. Recently, it has allowed sales to China of previous-generation products like H200 chips that are several years old. Taiwan is ultra-strict about exports of newer technology, lest it displease US regulators and, in particular, the Trump administration. 

Despite Taiwan’s clampdown, bad actors have found ways to get such chips into China. In one instance, $1 billion worth of server racks may have been shipped through Southeast Asian countries like Thailand or Malaysia to circumvent US export controls. In another case, the US charged three people with allegedly exporting $3.5 billion worth of AI servers to China, again by routing them through third-party countries.