Supermicro is in trouble with the law again.  Fresh on the heels of its previous criminal activity – where its founder was indicted for illegally shipping $2.5 billion worth of GPUs to China – comes news of another GPU-shipping scandal.

According to press reports, Supermicro’s offices in Taiwan were raided…though the company is quick to deny this.  SMCI states that its offices were not raided – just the stashes of six of its employees and three affiliated companies.

So it’s sort of an arm’s-length criminal enterprise.

Apparently the employees bought Supermicro servers equipped with the latest GPUs and sold them on to China.  Seems like at best this means Supermicro has incredibly weak controls.  At worst, they were happy to profit from these illegal shipments.

Did the company think that these employees were spending hundreds of thousands (millions?) of dollars to run Minecraft servers?

According to the Taiwanese prosecutor’s office announcement (which admittedly I translated with AI since I don’t speak Chinese):

The defendants allegedly knew that high-end AI servers manufactured by Super Micro Computer, Inc. (Supermicro) and equipped with high-end NVIDIA chips are subject to strict U.S. export controls and are completely prohibited from being exported to China, Hong Kong, and Macau.

Despite this, the defendants allegedly conspired to purchase these servers in Taiwan and, in order to obtain enormous illegal profits by selling them into China, Hong Kong, and Macau, submitted false export documentation and false declarations regarding the exports.

Apparently SMCI didn’t look at the export documentation very closely.

raindog308

raindog308 is a longtime community LETizen, technical writer, and self-described techno polymath. With deep roots in the *nix world, he has a passion for systems both modern and vintage, ranging from Unix, Perl, Python, and Golang to shell scripting and mainframe-era operating systems like MVS. He’s equally comfortable with relational database systems, having spent years working with Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

As an avid user of LowEndBox providers, raindog308 runs an empire of LEBs, from tiny boxes for VPNs, to mid-sized instances for application hosting, and heavyweight servers for data storage and complex databases. He brings both technical rigor and real-world experience to every piece he writes.

Beyond the command line, raindog308 has a life-long love of German Shepherd Dogs, high-quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop RPGs, playing guitar, and hiking in deep, quiet forests.

His goal with every article is to help users, from beginners to seasoned sysadmins, get more value, performance, and enjoyment out of their infrastructure.

You can find him daily in the forums at LowEndTalk under the handle @raindog308.