A total of 9 people have been indicted recently by the Keelung District Prosecutors’ Office in Taiwan over an alleged scheme to smuggle NVIDIA B300 GPUs into China.
Digitimes has revealed more details about the operation that also mentioned Supermicro, where the organization’s Taiwan subsidiary only selling B300 systems to whitelisted buyers who sign end-user agreements promising not to re-export or resell the GPUs to sanctioned parties, and orders of 8 units or more trigger an on-site inspection involving both companies.
As such, Taiwanese server trading firm Flying Tiger Tech obtained whitelist status and placed an order for 130 units, declaring itself the end user with servers to be installed in Taiwan. The order was routed through Albatron Technology, a listed Supermicro distributor, which the report says kept Supermicro from ever scrutinizing where Flying Tiger’s money actually came from.
To pass inspection, Flying Tiger reportedly leased colocation space from Chief Telecom but presented only a quotation rather than an actual signed lease. When inspectors visited the site in September 2025, they found it operational but lacking the racks, power, or bandwidth needed to run 130 B300 servers, and no one raised the issue at the time.
There’s also the “insiders” part, where specific individuals allegedly working within the supply chain to push the deal through, and one of them being a sales manager at NVIDIA Taiwan who pushed the quota through and told headquarters the inspection had been completed, and another working as a senior manager at Supermicro Taiwan who coached Flying Tiger through the review process, and a second Supermicro manager wh learned where the servers were actually headed but stayed quiet in exchange for a cut of the commissions.
With those approvals in place, Supermicro then cleared the sale of 130 B300 units across three shipments of 2, 64, and 64 units. Of the first 74 units, 16 were sent directly to China in January 2026, 50 more were routed through Indonesia before being transshipped to China, and 8 reportedly passed through a Japan-based entity controlled by the defendants before moving to Hong Kong and then China. That set of shipments was said to be worth $21.21 million in profit.
The scheme unraveled shortly after 56 units were declared to Japan and flagged by customs, which required a strategic high-tech commodities export permit. The defendants reportedly applied for one using fabricated mockups spliced together from parts of Supermicro’s real website. Once the scheme came to light, the servers were blocked from leaving the country.
Prosecutors say the investigation also uncovered a second, separate scheme involving Albatron’s general manager, a Supermicro manager, and the head of a small electronics firm, who allegedly billed Albatron NT$39 million for installation work that was never carried out, splitting the proceeds among themselves. The head of the electronics firm have turned himself in and confessed alongside Albatron’s GM, naming other participants in exchange for leniency, though they still face up to five years on export violations and six years on looting charges.
Supermicro has separately announced findings from its own investigation into the earlier US smuggling case, stating that senior management had no knowledge of the matter and that it found no evidence controlled products were sold to banned entities. As the report notes, this Taiwan-based scheme was uncovered by Taiwanese prosecutors rather than through Supermicro’s own audit process.
