미국 법무부(DOJ)는 캘리포니아 주민 한 명을 엔비디아 칩 3억 달러어치를 중국으로 밀반출한 혐의로 기소했다.

A federal indictment unsealed this month accuses a California server reseller of running restricted Nvidia GPUs through Malaysia and Singapore to Chinese buyers. It follows the same route that Malaysian customs had already caught in action earlier this year.

On October 1, the Justice Department unsealed a three-count indictment against Greg Lui, the 38-year-old owner of Earthmade Computer Inc. in City of Industry, California. Prosecutors say Lui and his co-conspirators bought servers loaded with Nvidia A100 and H100 chips, plus GeForce RTX 4090 and RTX 5090 cards, from U.S. manufacturers. The paperwork named approved overseas buyers as the final destination.

The hardware allegedly never stayed there. According to the indictment, it moved through Malaysia and Singapore and ended up in China, where none of it was supposed to go without a Commerce Department license.

The figures in the filing are specific enough to check. In one transaction cited by prosecutors, 27 servers bought for roughly $7.6 million in January 2024 were shipped to Kuala Lumpur. A co-conspirator later confirmed to Lui that the equipment had been forwarded to a Chinese buyer. Over the course of 2024, Earthmade allegedly received more than $176 million from two Malaysia-based shipping companies. Prosecutors say the payments were part of a scheme that moved close to $300 million in restricted hardware between October 2023 and August 2026. These details come from the Department of Justice and reporting by Courthouse News and The Register.

Lui faces three charges: conspiracy to violate the Export Control Reform Act, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and outbound smuggling. The first two carry up to 20 years each, and the smuggling count carries up to 10. He was arrested on October 1, and as of reporting by The Register and Newsweek, the case is pending in federal court.

Malaysian customs had already shown how this kind of diversion works. On June 5, officers raided the free trade zone at Kuala Lumpur International Airport and seized 72 server units worth about 52.9 million ringgit, or roughly $12.9 million. The shipments were declared as "computer components." The paperwork listed Malaysia as a transit point before the servers were to move on to another Asian country. That would have required a permit under the country's Strategic Trade Act, and none had been filed. A Malaysian company tied to the shipment was brought in to assist the investigation.

That seizure was not an isolated case. Malaysia had already opened a separate probe into how servers carrying U.S.-made Nvidia chips, bound for Singapore, ended up on Malaysian soil. In July, the government responded by requiring a Strategic Trade Permit, effective immediately, for any export, transshipment, or transit of high-performance U.S.-origin AI chips. Companies must now give 30 days' notice under Section 12 of the Strategic Trade Act before moving anything on the restricted list through the country.

Those rules were designed to stop exactly this kind of activity. The Lui indictment alleges that it continued anyway, on a far larger scale than a single airport seizure. Malaysian officials have repeatedly said they have found no direct evidence of chip diversion through the country, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has said the same.

The DOJ's case argues otherwise, at least for this one network. It also puts a dollar figure on the alleged activity that is more than twenty times the value of the June seizure.

None of this makes Malaysia uniquely compromised. It makes Malaysia the place where the paper trail is easiest to check. Its export-control regime is new enough that it still generates headlines when it catches something, or fails to. Singapore appears in the same indictment without the same scrutiny, and that asymmetry is worth watching in its own right. The $176 million in payments from Malaysian shipping companies to one California reseller did not move because Malaysia has lax rules on paper. It moved because enforcement at every point along the chain has lagged behind the volume of hardware looking for a way around a license requirement.

The chip war's black market has grown large enough that federal prosecutors now treat one reseller's shipping records as a $300 million case rather than a customs footnote. That shift matters more than any single seizure or indictment.