Taiwanese court has ordered the detention of two Super Micro employees as part of a widening investigation into whether AI servers built with Nvidia chips were illegally routed to China.
The Keelung District Court detained the pair, identified in Taiwanese press as managers surnamed Wang and Lin, on the night of June 30 into July 1, alongside a vice president at Albatron Technology, a Super Micro distributor.
Two additional employees at a separate firm, Chief Telecom, were questioned and released on bail, according to Taipei Times and Bloomberg reporting that both named the individuals involved.
Prosecutors at the Keelung District Prosecutors’ Office allege that export documents were falsified to disguise the true destination of high-end AI servers equipped with Nvidia’s GB300 chips, with this particular tranche valued at roughly NT$700 million, or about $22 million.
That figure is separate from, and considerably smaller than, the $2.5 billion smuggling scheme US federal prosecutors described in March when they indicted Super Micro co-founder Yih-Shyan “Wally” Liaw alongside two colleagues.
This is now the third distinct enforcement action to touch Super Micro’s Taiwan operations within months, following a raid on its Taiwan office in late June and the original detentions in May.
Super Micro said in an open letter on July 1 that it has “zero tolerance for anyone who violates the law or our internal policies,” and that “the relevant authorities have confirmed that Supermicro is not a target of this investigation.”
The company said it has been cooperating with Taiwanese authorities for several months and has placed all four employees questioned across the various probes on administrative leave pending the case’s outcome.
The case traces back to May 20, when Taiwan’s Coast Guard, working with Keelung prosecutors, intercepted 50 Nvidia GB300-equipped servers at the port along with roughly NT$9 million in cash, leading to the detention of three men at the time.
That seizure escalated on June 29, when prosecutors raided Super Micro’s Taiwan office along with Albatron and Chief Telecom sites, a search covering as many as a dozen locations.
Super Micro shares fell around 8% to 9% on the day of the raid, part of a monthly slide of roughly 37% that has coincided with the drumbeat of legal developments. The detentions also revive memories of Super Micro’s rockier recent history.
Short seller Hindenburg Research accused the company of accounting manipulation in August 2024, and Ernst & Young resigned as its auditor two months later, citing an inability to rely on management’s representations.
Super Micro narrowly avoided Nasdaq delisting by filing delayed financial statements before a November 2025 deadline, and an independent special committee found no evidence of fraud.
PwC has since taken over as auditor, though the current smuggling allegations, unlike the accounting episode, centre on individual employees and a distributor rather than the company’s own books. Super Micro’s board has flagged an export-control review ahead of its next earnings report, due August 4.
Taiwan’s own earlier detentions in May and a related probe into a Japan transshipment route suggest prosecutors are tracing multiple paths by which restricted hardware may have reached buyers in China.
Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang has called smuggled data centres a dead end, arguing that national security concerns outweigh any short-term sales lost to export controls.
No charges have yet been formally filed against the two detained employees, and Taiwanese procedure allows prosecutors months to build a case before deciding whether to indict.
That leaves Super Micro in a familiar position: distancing itself from allegations involving its own branded hardware while insisting the underlying business remains untouched.
Whether that distinction holds will depend on what investigators find as they work through the export paperwork at the centre of the case. Whether that cooperation extends to handing over internal export records has also not been disclosed publicly.
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