Californian accused of shipping $300M worth of Nvidia chips to China without Uncle Sam’s approval

A California business owner was arrested on Thursday after being charged with allegedly smuggling Nvidia hardware to China without the proper export licenses. Keeping the highest-end GPUs out of Chinese hands has been a priority for the US government. Greg Lui, 38, allegedly tried to export around $300 million worth of Nvidia kit - typically used for artificial intelligence (AI) development - via US-based freight businesses and Malaysian transshipment companies. Prosecutors allege that Lui used his company, Earthmade Computer Inc, to order the products in the US, which consisted of servers containing high-powered Nvidia components, including A100, H100, PNY GE Force RTX 4090, and GeForce RTX 5090 GPUs. Lui would then send them to Malaysia and Singapore, two countries that do not require licenses from the Commerce Department, and companies there would forward them to China in an effort to circumvent US export controls. …