The fixer pleads guilty, the co-founder does not

A contractor tied to Super Micro Computer has pleaded guilty in the scheme to export servers containing advanced Nvidia AI chips to China illegally, a federal court filing showed on Friday, Reuters reported. Ting-Wei "Willy" Sun pleaded guilty to four counts, including conspiracies to violate US export controls, to smuggle goods from the US, to defraud the country and to obstruct justice. He entered the plea on Thursday in US District Court in Manhattan.

The case began in March, when prosecutors charged Sun and two others associated with Super Micro, including a co-founder, with conspiring to divert about $2.5bn worth of US AI technology to China in violation of export law. The scheme began around October 2023, the indictment says, with Sun and others conspiring to export servers from a US manufacturer, "widely believed to be Super Micro," Reuters reported, without the required licences. The indictment names Nvidia's B200, H100 and H200 chips, and servers containing them, as subject to the restrictions.

Prosecutors call Sun a broker and "fixer." The Next Web, citing Bloomberg, reported that the group sent servers powered by Nvidia chips to a company in Southeast Asia and then diverted them to customers in China. The indictment says the group tried to fool auditors by falsifying records and setting up "dummy" servers, and TNW said they allegedly used a hair dryer to attach serial numbers. Reuters said Sun helped stage the dummy servers in December 2025 and made false statements to a US Department of Commerce officer during an inspection of servers that had supposedly been stored and had already been diverted to China.

The two others charged have not pleaded guilty. Yih-Shyan "Wally" Liaw, who co-founded Super Micro in 1993 and joined its board in 2023, has pleaded not guilty and has left the board, TNW reported. Ruei-Tsang "Steven" Chang, a former sales manager at Super Micro's Taiwan office, has not appeared in court, TNW said. Reuters said a lawyer for Liaw did not immediately respond to a request for comment and Chang's lawyer could not immediately be reached. Sun's lawyer declined to comment. Sun will be sentenced in September 2027, TNW said.

Super Micro is not a defendant. It referred to its earlier statements that it was not named in the indictment and that the case has had no impact on its business operations, Reuters said. It terminated Sun and cut ties with the other defendants earlier this year. TNW said the company said in August that its current senior leaders did not know about the scheme and that it is working with investigators.

Yahoo Finance put the sum in context. Super Micro's revenue rose from $14.99bn in its 2024 fiscal year to $21.97bn in fiscal 2025 and reached $39.06bn over the last 12 months, Yahoo Finance reported. Across those periods it booked $76.02bn, so the roughly $2.5bn of server purchases identified by prosecutors is about 3.3 per cent of that total, or 6.4 per cent of the last 12 months' revenue, by Yahoo's arithmetic. Yahoo cautioned that the comparison illustrates scale and "does not establish Super Micro's potential financial exposure," and that shareholders have separately sued the company over alleged disclosure failures related to the exports.

Cases like this one are multiplying. TNW reported that US prosecutors last week charged a California man with sending $300m of AI servers to China. Reuters set the case against the background of competition between the US and China for dominance in AI, a technology it said both countries see as critical to economic growth, national security and military capability.

The plea matters because it comes from the insider the indictment says organised the cover-up. Yahoo noted that the case's first guilty plea includes obstruction of justice. What Sun tells prosecutors about the others, and whether anyone further up the chain is named, will not be known until the cases against Liaw and Chang move forward. The policy side is moving in the same direction: new semiconductor export rules have slowed while enforcement penalties have grown sharply, as we reported, and the controls also shape how AI models treat different chips, as in the export control that is not in the licence.