AINEWS
B300 is Nvidia's high end AI accelerator, banned from sale to China since 2022.
A Taiwan prosecutor's office has charged nine people, including a current Nvidia manager and two former Super Micro employees, with smuggling high-end AI servers to mainland China in violation of US export controls. The Keelung District indictment, filed this week and reviewed by the Guardian, names the alleged authorizer of the banned-chip releases and lays out how US export controls on advanced AI chips are tested in practice.
According to prosecutors, 74 servers made it to mainland China: 50 routed through Indonesia, 16 shipped directly, and 8 sent through Japan to Hong Kong. The servers housed B300 GPUs, Nvidia's high-end AI accelerator, banned from sale to China since 2022 and still restricted under the April 2025 licensing regime that covers the slower H20 part. The B300 is the chip. The server is the rack-scale computer that houses it, and the case is about the rack-scale hardware, not the standalone accelerator Nvidia sells separately.
Prosecutors say some defendants set up a company in Japan, built websites for non-existent end users, and falsified shipping paperwork. Under the company policy prosecutors cited, purchases of more than eight high-end AI servers are supposed to trigger an on-site client check, the kind of visit that would have surfaced the fake end-user sites. The indictment alleges the defendants skipped it. The 50 servers through Indonesia and the 8 through Japan to Hong Kong show the controls failing at the signature rather than at the border.
At the center sits Chang, the Nvidia manager prosecutors call the "key figure." He allegedly "authorized the release of the B300 GPUs," the indictment says. Prosecutors describe Chang's post-offense posture as showing "a clearly poor attitude" and are seeking the maximum five-year sentence for him and three other defendants. The named-insider framing puts a corporate signature at the center of the case rather than a forged document or a bribed customs officer. Prosecutors identified Chang by family name only; the other eight defendants were not named in the indictment's public release.
A second attempted shipment of 56 servers was intercepted before it left Taiwan. The same signature, contested this time, caught the load before it moved.
Nvidia, asked about the charges, pointed to cooperation with the Taiwanese investigation. "We will work with the Taiwan authorities to help them resolve the allegations as quickly as possible," spokesperson Patrick Rutherford told the Associated Press. Super Micro, the San Jose server maker whose two former employees were also charged, said the arrests followed from its own cooperation with investigators and that it would "enhance its robust export compliance program to protect American innovation." Nvidia's statement does not address the named allegation that an authorized manager released the chips; Super Micro's says its own compliance work produced the case.
US export controls on advanced AI chips to China date to 2022 and have been tightened in successive rounds. The April 2025 licensing rule for the H20 chip added a new layer of controls; some sales were later allowed to resume. The B300 has remained a controlled item throughout, and the Keelung indictment ties a specific failure to a specific corporate signature.