A $300 million Nvidia GPU smuggling case surfaces as export control enforcement action intensifies.
A California tech executive is facing federal charges over an alleged scheme to route more than $300 million worth of Nvidia-equipped servers into China, the U.S. Department of Justice announced on October 1, 2026. Greg Lui, who also goes by Yiu Kong Lui, is accused of using his company, Earthmade Computer Inc., to disguise shipments of export-controlled Nvidia GPUs through Malaysia, Singapore, and Hong Kong before the hardware reached buyers in China.
The 38-year-old, based in San Gabriel, faces three felony counts tied to export control violations, smuggling, and money laundering. Each count carries a decade-plus prison exposure. The case emerges at a moment when Nvidia's China chip problem continues surfacing in federal court. Prosecutors have brought several similar cases through 2026, and a Bloomberg investigation found that Nvidia's own screening process has repeatedly missed shipments that outside officials viewed as obvious red flags.
According to the Justice Department's announcement, Lui owned and ran Earthmade Computer Inc., a technology company based in City of Industry, California. Federal prosecutors allege that from around October 2023 until at least August 2026, Lui and unnamed co-conspirators bought high-end servers loaded with controlled Nvidia GPUs from U.S. manufacturers, then used falsified paperwork to claim the hardware was headed to permitted buyers in Malaysia or Singapore. Instead, the servers were allegedly rerouted to customers in China without the export licenses the U.S. Commerce Department requires for that class of chip.
Court filings describe specific transactions. In one instance, Lui allegedly submitted a purchase order to a U.S. manufacturer for 27 servers worth roughly $7,614,000 in January 2024, shipped to Kuala Lumpur, with a co-conspirator later telling a Malaysian official that all 27 units had been forwarded to China. A separate shipment of 92 export-controlled servers was allegedly routed through Singapore, then Malaysia, then Hong Kong, before landing with a buyer in Hangzhou, a hub for Chinese AI firms. That multi-country path is the kind of layered routing designed to outrun paperwork checks at any single port.
In another flagged shipment, prosecutors allege Lui sent 100 servers bound for Malaysia, loaded with Nvidia H100 GPUs, together carrying a declared value exceeding $22 million. To support the paperwork, Lui allegedly submitted fraudulent documentation naming a fake buyer whose CEO was identified as "Jackie Lui." Prosecutors say Lui had previously purchased the identity documents of a real person and used that identity to help run the scheme.
The indictment names four Nvidia GPU models: A100 and H100, both data-center accelerators long subject to U.S. export licensing, alongside GeForce RTX 4090 and RTX 5090, consumer gaming cards. While the A100 and H100 are not Nvidia's most advanced chips by 2026 standards, they remain powerful enough to train large language models at meaningful scale—exactly the capability U.S. export rules were written to prevent from reaching Chinese hands. The presence of consumer cards alongside data-center silicon suggests alleged buyers in China were assembling compute capacity from whatever Nvidia hardware they could acquire, and hints at enforcement challenges: a shipment of gaming GPUs looks far less suspicious on paper than a pallet of H100s.
Lui faces three counts: conspiracy to violate the Export Control Reform Act and Export Administration Regulations, outbound smuggling, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. The first and third counts each carry a maximum of 20 years in prison; the smuggling count carries a maximum of 10 years. These are maximum statutory penalties tied to each individual count. Lui has not been convicted and currently faces an indictment, meaning the allegations have not yet been proven in court.
"Preventing the illegal export of controlled technology is critical to protecting our national security," said Special Agent in Charge John E. Helsing of the Defense Criminal Investigative Service's Western Field Office. "These technologies provide core advantages to U.S. forces, and ensuring they remain safeguarded prevents adversaries from exploiting them."
Beyond the chip routing, prosecutors detail the money trail. Earthmade allegedly received more than $176 million from two Malaysian shipping companies in 2024 alone. Bank records from accounts Lui held at Bank of America and JPMorgan show how payments moved through the scheme. The Justice Department is seeking forfeiture of all funds it says were generated through the alleged export evasion—a standard step to claw back profits tied to the underlying crime.
The Lui case did not surface in isolation. It follows an earlier smuggling scheme involving a Nvidia senior manager based in Taiwan and former Supermicro staff.