U.S. federal authorities arrested Greg Lui, 38, also known as "Yiu Kong Lui," on Oct. 1, 2026, on a three-count federal indictment charging him with smuggling more than $300 million worth of export-controlled, high-end computer servers containing U.S.-manufactured graphics processing units to China, the Department of Justice said. Lui, of San Gabriel, California, owns Earthmade Computer Inc., a closely held technology company based in City of Industry named in the indictment, which was returned on Sept. 29 and unsealed with the arrest. The charges are conspiracy to violate the Export Control Reform Act and the Export Administration Regulations, outbound smuggling, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
According to the Justice Department, Lui and his co-conspirators used Earthmade between 2023 and 2024 to buy and send export-controlled items to China without the licenses required by the U.S. Department of Commerce. Instead of applying for those licenses, they routed the servers to countries such as Malaysia and Singapore, where no such license is required, and then illegally re-exported them to China. The paperwork given to U.S. manufacturers allegedly misrepresented the permissible end users and end destinations, and freight forwarders moved the goods once they had left the United States. Lui allegedly acted knowing the true end users were in China, where U.S. rules bar the export of such high-end technology on national security and foreign policy grounds.
The indictment describes one shipment in detail. In January 2024, Lui emailed a co-conspirator saying a Malaysian transshipment company wanted to buy 70 servers with export-restricted GPUs, attaching an export compliance form. Later that month he submitted a purchase order to a U.S. manufacturer for 27 of those servers at approximately $7,614,000, and the servers were shipped from Los Angeles to Kuala Lumpur. That March, a co-conspirator emailed a Malaysian government official stating the 27 servers had in fact been transshipped to a China-based buyer. From January 2024 to October 2024, Earthmade received more than $176 million from two Malaysia-based shipment companies as part of the scheme, according to the indictment.
Ars Technica reported that the indictment identifies the GPUs involved as Nvidia's A100 and H100, and describes additional shipments, including a consignment of 92 export-controlled servers routed through Singapore to Malaysia and then Hong Kong before reaching a Chinese firm based in Hangzhou. Ars also cited a flagged 2024 shipment of 100 Malaysia-bound servers containing H100 GPUs, which it described as worth more than $22 million and accompanied by documentation from a fictitious buyer whose chief executive was listed as "Jackie Lui." Ars reported the alleged scheme ran from October 2023 until August 2026; the Justice Department's statement describes conduct in 2023 and 2024.
The case matters because it is a criminal test of how effectively the United States can enforce export controls on the hardware that underpins advanced AI, at a time when Washington is trying to keep that computing capacity out of Chinese hands. It also adds to scrutiny of Nvidia's compliance record: Ars noted a separate earlier case involving former Supermicro staff in Taiwan and a senior Nvidia manager there, and cited a Bloomberg investigation into what officials describe as gaps in Nvidia's due diligence on suspicious shipments. Nvidia told Bloomberg that less than one half of one percent of its products had allegedly been diverted to China, a figure the company has made public; according to Ars, experts consider the black market hard to measure and potentially larger. If convicted on all counts, Lui faces a maximum of 20 years in prison on the conspiracy count, 20 years on the money-laundering count and 10 years on the smuggling count. The Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security Office of Export Enforcement, the Defense Criminal Investigative Service and the FBI are investigating, and prosecutors are also seeking forfeiture of property tied to the alleged scheme.
Two caveats are worth stating. First, an indictment is an allegation: the Justice Department notes that all defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty, and none of the conduct described has been established in court. Second, the figures - the $300 million total, the $176 million in payments and the $7.6 million order - are the prosecution's characterization of specific transactions, and the timeline reported by Ars extends beyond the period covered in the Justice Department's own release; the scale of unauthorized diversion of AI hardware to China remains contested and, by the admission of the officials quoted in press coverage, difficult to quantify.
Sources
- US Department of Justice, Office of Public Affairs - California Man Arrested for Smuggling More Than $300 Million in Export-Controlled Computer Servers to China (01/10/2026): justice.gov
- Ars Technica - US arrests tech CEO accused of smuggling $300M in Nvidia chips into China (10/2026): arstechnica.com
