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Taiwanese authorities raided the Taiwan office of Supermicro on Monday as they probed the alleged smuggling of Nvidia’s AI chips to China, sending the server maker’s shares down about 8 per cent.
Taiwan’s Keelung District Prosecutors Office raided Supermicro’s office as part of an ongoing investigation into allegedly illegal exports of the company’s servers, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Taiwan’s Albatron Technology Co, a distributor for Supermicro, confirmed in a filing on Monday that it had also been the target of an official search.
Supermicro said in a statement that it was “working closely with Taiwanese authorities on recent events”, which it said underscored the importance of industry collaboration with governments to facilitate the enforcement of export laws.
“Supermicro products continue to be targeted in these matters, and we continue to co-operate with law enforcement and government officials in Taiwan and other jurisdictions in which we operate to ensure our technology is distributed as lawfully intended,” the company added.
Supermicro had confirmed last month that it was co-operating with US and Taiwanese authorities to “prevent illicit diversion of server technology”.
Washington has long leaned on Taiwan to more proactively police China’s access to American AI chip technology. Re-exporting chips from Taiwan to China is not a criminal offence in Taiwan, although authorities are reportedly considering stricter export controls to align with the US.
In May, Supermicro said three suspects had been arrested and 50 servers had been seized in Taiwan after being sold by Supermicro to an authorised reseller of its products. The company has emphasised the risk of its products being diverted after they are sold to authorised customers.
San Jose-based Supermicro, one of a number of companies that package Nvidia’s AI chips into servers, has come under scrutiny from US investigators in recent months.
In March, US prosecutors charged three people, including Supermicro co-founder and board member Wally Liaw, with smuggling $2.5bn of Nvidia’s AI chip servers to Chinese customers. Liaw subsequently resigned from the company’s board.
Liaw and his co-defendant, contractor Willy Sun, have pleaded not guilty to charges at a New York federal court. A Taiwan-based Supermicro employee, Steven Chang, remained a fugitive, New York’s federal prosecutor said at the time.
Nvidia’s most advanced AI chips, used for training and running AI models, are banned from sale in China under US export controls. Restrictions on the flow of these chips are part of the race between Washington and Beijing to control the technology that powers frontier models such as Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Last week the FT reported that the prices of Nvidia’s chips in China’s black market had doubled this year as US authorities have cracked down on illicit exports.
Nvidia did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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