The US Justice Department has charged a California business owner with running a $300 million scheme to funnel export-controlled Nvidia servers into China. Prosecutors say Greg Lui, 38, of San Gabriel, used his company Earthmade Computer to buy high-end servers from American manufacturers, falsify paperwork claiming they were bound for Malaysia or Singapore, and then reroute the hardware onward to Chinese buyers. He faces three felony counts, carrying combined maximum sentences well past 40 years. None of it has been proven; this is an indictment, and Lui is presumed innocent.
The headline number is large but not record-breaking. It sits below the $2.5 billion Super Micro case earlier this year, in which a co-founder of that firm was charged over servers loaded with Nvidia H200 and B200 chips. What makes the Earthmade indictment worth reading closely is not the dollar figure. It is the shopping list. Among the four Nvidia products named are the A100 and H100, the data-center accelerators export rules were written to contain. Sitting right beside them are the GeForce RTX 4090 and RTX 5090: ordinary gaming cards, sold to teenagers and video editors the world over.
That combination tells you how the fight has shifted. Consumer graphics cards carry enough memory and compute to be useful for smaller-scale AI research and inference, and a pallet of them draws far less attention than a crate of H100s. The alleged buyers in China, prosecutors suggest, were not holding out for the newest silicon. They were assembling capacity from whatever Nvidia hardware they could get, which is exactly why enforcement has had to widen from the flagship chips to the stuff on the shelf at any electronics store.
The court filings read like a logistics thriller. In one January 2024 order, Lui allegedly bought 27 servers worth about $7.6 million, shipped them to Kuala Lumpur, and a co-conspirator later told a Malaysian official that all 27 had already moved on to China. A separate batch of 92 servers was allegedly routed through Singapore, then Malaysia, then Hong Kong, before landing in Hangzhou, a hub for Chinese AI firms. In another shipment of 100 servers packed with H100s and declared at over $22 million, prosecutors say Lui invented a buyer whose chief executive was named "Jackie Lui," built on identity documents he had bought from a real person three years earlier.
None of this is an isolated case. Investigators brought charges against four people in a separate plot in November 2025, and against a group of Chinese nationals the previous August. Three big prosecutions inside fourteen months, each with a different company and a different smuggling route through Southeast Asia, point to a sustained enforcement push rather than a run of coincidences. A Bloomberg investigation cited in the coverage found that Nvidia's own screening had repeatedly waved through shipments that outside officials considered obvious red flags, though prosecutors have aimed their cases at the dealers, not the chipmaker.
The deeper story is the gap between policy and physics. Washington can restrict the sale of a chip, but it cannot easily change the fact that a controlled accelerator and an unremarkable gaming card are built on much of the same technology, and that both move through the same tangle of freight forwarders and front companies. Each prosecution closes one route and reveals how many others remain open. As long as the compute inside a gaming GPU is worth smuggling, the paperwork at a Malaysian port will keep doing more work than the law ever intended it to.