Three men charged with conspiring to smuggle U.S. artificial intelligence to China

Three men, including a Super Micro VP, charged with smuggling U.S. AI technology to China, threatening national security.

A senior vice president of Super Micro Computer Inc. and two others affiliated with the company were charged on Thursday (March 19, 2026) with conspiring to smuggle billions of dollars of computer servers containing advanced Nvidia chips to China.

The men violated U.S. export controls laws by scheming to divert massive quantities of the high-performance servers assembled in the United States to China between 2024 and 2025, according to the indictment in Manhattan federal court.

In a release, FBI Assistant Director in Charge James C. Barnacle Jr. said the defendants used fabricated documents, staged bogus equipment to pass audit inventories and utilised a pass-through company to conceal their misconduct and true clientele list.

U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton said schemes such as this “pose a direct threat to U.S. national security.”

Nvidia’s processors have emerged as indispensable building blocks for the data centers that power artificial intelligence — a potentially game-changing technology that could reshape society and change the balance of power in the world. For that reason, the U.S. and China are dueling to gain the upper hand in AI, evoking memories of the arms race between the U.S. and Germany to develop the first nuclear bomb during World War II.

To help gain the upper hand, U.S. President Joe Biden had put restrictions on the sale of Nvidia’s AI chips to China — a prohibition that President Donald Trump has maintained on the company’s most powerful processors. The Trump administration last year began loosening the ban on Nvidia’s China sales for its lower-tier AI chips in exchange for a 15% commission paid to the U.S. government. But even with that concession, Nvidia still didn’t factor in any China sales in the revenue forecast included in its most recent financial report released late last month.