California reseller Greg Lui charged over $300 million of Nvidia servers routed to China
The owner of Earthmade Computer faces three federal counts over servers moved on false paperwork through Malaysia and Singapore, in a scheme charging papers date to at least mid-August 2026. It is the second US indictment in this trade in seven months, and Nvidia is now helping the prosecutions.
Vincent Jiang · 3 min read
Federal agents arrested Greg Lui on 1 October 1, and the gray market in US AI servers now has a named defendant on a federal docket. Lui, 38, of San Gabriel, owns Earthmade Computer, a closely held reseller in the City of Industry east of Los Angeles 2. A three-count indictment, USA v. Lui, 26-cr-00618, charges conspiracy to violate export controls, outbound smuggling and money laundering over more than $300 million in Nvidia-equipped servers shipped to China 1.
The stake for anyone holding NVDA or pricing the server channel is whether the gray market outlived the enforcement. Charging papers date the alleged scheme to at least mid-August 2026 1, five months after prosecutors in New York charged a Super Micro co-founder 3 and in the same month Taiwan indicted nine over B300 servers bound for China 4. No filing quantifies a market reaction; the docket is the signal.
The paperwork is the crime
The mechanics are documentary, not technical. Lui and unnamed co-conspirators bought servers from US manufacturers on false end-user documents, shipped them to Malaysia and Singapore, where no license is required, then re-exported them to China 12. One purchase order in January 2024 covered 27 servers with H100 GPUs for about $7.6 million, sent from Los Angeles to Kuala Lumpur; a co-conspirator later emailed a Malaysian government official confirming the machines had gone on to a buyer in China 25.
The money trail: $176 million, then the filings went dark
Earthmade collected more than $176 million from two Malaysia-based shipping companies between January and October 2024 25. The receipts behind The Inference's 2 October report, 'China's state money bought banned Nvidia B300 servers, then redacted the receipts', went dark at the end of June: Semi-Tech Leasing, a Chinese lessor controlled by local governments, finished redacting filings that traced more than 3 billion yuan of financing for servers, 32 of them B300 units 6. The Lui papers date the alleged smuggling to at least mid-August, six weeks past that point 1.
One $7.6 million order, $176 million in receipts, $300 million charged
Data
| US dollars | |
|---|---|
| One purchase order, Jan 2024 | $7.6M |
| Shippers' receipts, Jan-Oct 2024 | $176M |
| Value charged, Oct 2026 | $300M |
The second docket in seven months
In March, prosecutors charged Super Micro co-founder Yih-Shyan "Wally" Liaw and two others with helping move at least $2.5 billion in US AI technology to China; SMCI fell 19 percent premarket and one defendant is still a fugitive 3. On 24 August, Taiwan charged nine people, among them an Nvidia manager described as the key figure in releasing banned B300 servers, and two former Super Micro employees 4. Los Angeles prosecutors charged two Chinese nationals on the same Malaysia-Singapore route a year earlier 7.
Of the 130 B300 servers in the Taiwan case, 74 reached China 8. B300 servers have sold in China at roughly double the US price 8. That margin, not ideology, explains a channel that kept running while the indictments piled up.
Who holds the risk
Nvidia now works the enforcement side of its own supply chain, calling smuggling "a losing proposition" and crediting its work with law enforcement for prosecutions 1. The most valuable US company by market capitalization 7 has a China leakage problem that is criminal, not commercial. The indictment is allegation, not verdict: Lui is presumed innocent 5, no attorney is listed for him 17, and prosecutors want him held without bail over a "serious risk" of flight 1.
Detention hearing next, co-conspirators unnamed
Next on the docket: the detention hearing on that no-bail request, and a lawyer for Lui, whom the docket did not list as of the charging announcement 7. One account of the filings ties some buyers to the Chinese government; no other report carries that detail 9. The unnamed co-conspirators remain the wider watch. Export controls are enforced one invoice at a time, and the invoices have started carrying names.
More about NVIDIA
NVDA · Fiscal Q2 2027Revenue rose 106% to $96.2B, 92.5% of it from Data Center, “driven by the ramp of our Blackwell Ultra infrastructure”. Gains on equity stakes of $7.8B lifted net income to $59.7B.
Show as a table
| Line | Value |
|---|---|
| Revenue | $96.2B |
| Gross margin | 75.0% |
| Operating margin | 66.2% |
| Net income | $59.7B |
| Hyperscale | $48.7B |
| AI clouds & enterprise | $40.3B |
| Data Center | $89.0B |
| Edge Computing | $7.2B |
| Gross profit | $72.1B |
| Cost of revenue | $24.1B |
| Other income | $7.8B |
| Operating income | $63.7B |
| Operating expenses | $8.4B |
| Tax | $11.8B |
| R&D | $7.1B |
| SG&A | $1.4B |
Deepdive
AI-generated from this story and its cited sources. Not investment advice.
