US arrests a CEO over alleged Nvidia exports

In a press release on Thursday, the US Department of Justice accused 38-year-old Greg Lui of using false paperwork to mask shipments of servers worth more than $300 million that he allegedly knew were ultimately destined for China. Lui is the chief executive of Earthmade Computer. The indictment alleges that he conspired with freight forwarders in places including Malaysia and Singapore to divert export-controlled chips into China, including Nvidia’s A100 and H100. The article says these are not Nvidia’s most advanced chips, but they can process large amounts of data and train large language models. The department points to emails and bank records. The alleged conduct ran from October 2023 to August 2026. These are charges, not a guilty verdict.

The article lists shipments named by the department. This piece keeps the allegations and does not turn them into a method. A 2024 email discussed an order for 70 servers with export-restricted processors, falsely described as destined for Malaysia. The department says Lui submitted a purchase order to a US manufacturer for 27 of those servers, for about $7,614,000, and that a co-conspirator then told a Malaysian official that all 27 were shipped to China. Another 92 export-controlled servers were allegedly routed through Singapore to Malaysia, then Hong Kong, and on to a Chinese firm in Hangzhou. The Wall Street Journal last year described that city as China’s artificial-intelligence hub. A further shipment was 100 servers declared as bound for Malaysia, each containing Nvidia H100 chips and worth more than $22 million. The department says the buyer’s documents named the chief executive as Jackie Lui. The FBI alleges that three years earlier he bought identity documents of a person known to the grand jury and used them in the transactions. In 2024, his firm allegedly received more than $176 million. Payment records from Bank of America and JPMorgan accounts are cited as further evidence.

Lui faces three counts: conspiring to violate the Export Control Reform Act and the Export Administration Regulations, plus federal smuggling and money laundering. The department wants to seize the proceeds. If he is convicted of the conspiracy count or the money-laundering count, each carries up to 20 years. The smuggling count carries up to 10 years. Those are statutory maximums, not a sentence.

An Nvidia spokesperson told Bloomberg on Thursday, in the words Ars quotes, that “less than one half of one percent to Nvidia products” have allegedly been diverted to China. The sentence as quoted is not grammatically tidy. One half of one percent is half a percent, but the preposition does not state the denominator cleanly, so the quote is kept and not rewritten into a smoother definition. The spokesperson also said governments and the press have found insignificant diversion of controlled US products, a small amount next to the domestic compute China already has. Experts say the black market is hard to measure and is likely larger than what has been reported. A Bloomberg investigation says officials suspect hundreds of thousands of chips are moving in that trade. Nvidia disagrees that it could have stopped the shipments officials have flagged. A spokesperson said a startup’s growth plan in a friendly country is an opportunity, not a signal to fear. The company also told Bloomberg it will keep working with Megaspeed until it is ordered to stop, and it would not comment on whether it ran the urgent checks the US government requested. Those are company statements and Bloomberg’s reporting, not facts a court has found.