Prosecutors from the Taiwan Keelung District Office arrested three individuals last week, suspected of smuggling Nvidia chips to China. According to Bloomberg, the Taiwanese authorities also seized 50 Super Micro servers with falsified documents that were reportedly ultimately destined for Hong Kong via Japan. Aside from the seized servers, authorities say that an earlier batch of shipments had already been smuggled successfully using fake documentation.
This is the first arrest Taiwan has made in connection with the U.S. crackdown on AI chip smuggling, and the first to reveal Japan as a transshipment point for these illicit goods. Many smuggling operations have been using Southeast Asian nations to route Nvidia chips to China. However, countries like Singapore and Malaysia have started cracking down on these outfits, meaning smugglers need to look for other ways to get the banned hardware under the radar.
