Nvidia employees charged with smuggling chips to China

An Nvidia manager and team have been charged with smuggling advanced AI chips into China, reports the Financial Times.  This is the first known indictment of a worker at the US chipmaker over alleged illegal exports. 

Taiwan’s Keelung District Prosecutors’ Office charged nine people, including employees of server maker Super Micro Computer, on Monday with illegally selling high-end AI servers to Chinese customers. 

Many of Nvidia’s chips and servers are made on the island. They described a Taiwan-based senior manager at Nvidia surnamed Zhang as the “central figure” in a scheme involving 130 of the chipmaker’s flagship B300 servers. The B300 is a popular server for training AI models and contains Nvidia’s advanced chips. The servers are subject to US export controls as Washington tries to constrain China’s ability to develop cutting-edge AI.