銳報SHARPPOST
Technology

SharpPost Editorial Team |

US authorities arrested the owner of California technology company Earthmade Computer on October 1, accusing him of using false documents to send more than $300 million worth of restricted AI servers to China through third countries. The servers contained high-end, US-made graphics processing units, or GPUs, according to the Justice Department.

Greg Lui, 38, also known as Yiu Kong Lui, lives in San Gabriel, near Los Angeles. His company is based in the nearby City of Industry. A federal grand jury indicted him on September 29 on three counts: conspiracy to violate US export controls, outbound smuggling and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

Prosecutors allege that Lui and his co-conspirators bought controlled equipment from US manufacturers in 2023 and 2024, knowing the end users were in China. They submitted documents falsely identifying buyers and destinations that did not require the relevant export licenses, then used freight forwarders to send the servers to Malaysia and Singapore before rerouting them to China.

John Eisenberg, the Justice Department's assistant attorney general for national security, said the indictment also alleges that the group staged dummy servers to mislead inspectors and conceal the restricted equipment's destination.

The department described a January 2024 email in which Lui told a co-conspirator that a Malaysian transshipment company wanted to buy 70 servers containing restricted GPUs. An attached export compliance form indicated that the company knew US rules restricted the sale, transshipment or export of those servers, prosecutors said.

Later that month, Lui submitted an order to a US manufacturer for 27 servers costing about $7.614 million and arranged with a co-conspirator to ship them from Los Angeles to Kuala Lumpur. Prosecutors said the packing list identified the GPUs as export-controlled and stated that the equipment could not be sent to China without a license.

Bloomberg reported that the 27 servers contained Nvidia H100 GPUs. In March 2024, a co-conspirator emailed a Malaysian government official saying those servers had been forwarded to a China-based buyer, according to prosecutors.

A rack-mounted server fitted with Nvidia H100 GPUs, shown in a file image
A server fitted with Nvidia H100 GPUs. File image; not equipment seized in this case. Image: 极客湾Geekerwan / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0.

The indictment also traces payments to Earthmade. The company received more than $176 million from two Malaysian shipping companies between January and October 2024 as part of the alleged scheme, the department said.

Roman Rozhavsky, assistant director of the FBI's Counterintelligence and Espionage Division, alleged that Lui sold hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of advanced US computing technology to the Chinese government. Prosecutors cited the equipment's potential to strengthen other countries' military capabilities. The FBI, the Commerce Department and a Defense Department investigative agency are investigating the case.

Bloomberg reported that prosecutors sought to keep Lui in custody without bail, citing a serious flight risk. At the time of its report, the court docket did not identify a lawyer representing him, and Nvidia had not immediately responded to Bloomberg's request for comment.

The US attorney's office in Los Angeles said Lui was expected to make his initial court appearance on October 2. If convicted, he faces maximum prison terms of 20 years on each conspiracy count and 10 years on the smuggling count. The charges remain allegations, and he is presumed innocent unless proven guilty.