Nvidia. Official arrested for alleged illegal exports to China

The Taiwanese Court has put a Nvidia official in custody for suspected involvement in the illegal shipment of artificial intelligence servers to China in a case related to alleged violations of US export controls.

28/07/2026
by

Lusa

Na statement released today, the district attorney's office of Keelung, in northern Taiwan, reported that it ordered, on July 24, searches for the residence and workplace of a suspected nickname Chang, without identifying the company where it works.

According to the Public Prosecutor, Chang is suspected, among other crimes, of falsifying documents prepared in the exercise of professional activity.

After the interrogation, the prosecutors considered there to be strong evidence of the practice of crimes and risk of escape, destruction of evidence and collusion with other suspects and witnesses, having requested pre-trial detention, without possibility of visits or contacts with the outside, a measure that was authorized by the court.

“Nvidia would not exist without Sega.” History of how Nvidia almost went bankrupt

Nvidia's co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang recalled that it was not the $5 million Sega invested in the company in 1996, the company would have gone bankrupt. The leader of technology attended an event in Tokyo, where he publicly thanked the video game company.

Miguel Patinha Dias

The Bloomberg agency has advanced today, citing anonymous sources, that the suspect is an employee of the U.S. giant of the Nvidia semiconductor area, in what will be the first known case of a lawsuit by the Taiwanese authorities against a company worker.

The investigation is the third wave of searches conducted by the Keelung Public Prosecutor's Office in a case concerning the alleged illegal shipment to mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau of high capacity AI servers equipped with advanced Nvidia chips, bypassing export controls imposed by the United States.

In May, the Attorney General announced the opening of the investigation, indicating that the equipment was subject to strict restrictions and could not be exported to those destinations without a license.

Nvidia leader jacket sold at auction for almost a million dollars

The fur coat, a black Tom Ford from the spring-summer collection of 2023, was sold at a Sotheby’s auction for $960.000, equivalent to about €840.000.

Miguel Patinha Dias

The diligence takes place weeks after the arrest of two employees of the US company Super Micro Computer and an administrator of Albatron Technology, a distributor of Super Micro in Taiwan, during the second phase of the investigation.

In a statement released on May 21, the investigators stated that these three suspects knew that the servers were covered by export controls and that their sale to China, Hong Kong and Macao was totally prohibited.

The Taiwanese investigation was opened about two months after US Justice accused three people, including Super Micro Computer co-founder Yih-Shyan “Wally” Liaw, of allegedly violating US export control laws.

Today, millionaire, leader of Nvidia has cleaned toilets at the age of 9

Jensen Huang, born in Taiwan in 1963, had two troubled years when he arrived in the United States and, at the age of nine, was sent (by mistake) to a teaching institution where he had to clean toilets while his brother worked on a tobacco plantation.

Miguel Patinha Dias

According to the United States prosecution, the defendants conspired to send Chinese customers servers worth billions of dollars equipped with sensitive technology, including graphical processing units (GPU), without the required licenses.

According to sources quoted by Bloomberg, the Taiwanese authorities seized about 50 servers before they left the island.

However, a previous shipment will have managed to leave Taiwan, passing through Japan before arriving in Hong Kong, one of the main transit points for technological equipment subsequently re-exported to mainland China.