The route

One purchase order cited in the indictment covers 27 servers with Nvidia H100 GPUs for about $7.6 million, placed in January 2024 and listed as headed for Malaysia. Another shipment of 92 servers went from Singapore to Malaysia to Hong Kong, then to a firm in Hangzhou. Between January and October 2024, Earthmade received more than $176 million from two Malaysia-based shipping companies. The evidence, per the DOJ, includes emails and bank records at Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase, plus paperwork that misidentified Lui as "Jackie Lui." Malaysia and Singapore sit outside the Commerce Department's licensing regime for these parts. China does not. That gap is the whole business model.

The corridor, not the crime

This route keeps appearing. Courthouse News notes a 2025 case where Chinese nationals moved tens of millions of dollars of Nvidia chips through the same Malaysia–Singapore transshipment pattern. In August, Taiwanese authorities indicted nine people, including employees of Nvidia and Supermicro, over alleged AI server exports to mainland China. US restrictions on advanced Nvidia chip exports to China started in 2022 and have widened since. The wall gets taller every year. The leak is the same joint in the wall.

Read the indictment's wording

First Assistant US Attorney Bill Essayli said his office will "aggressively prosecute those who put our national security at risk for profit," and described the mission as keeping "our advanced Super Intelligence technology" from strengthening adversaries' military capabilities. That phrasing does quiet work. "Super intelligence" turns a commercial product category into a national asset with a name of its own, the kind of language that makes future export cases easier to argue and harder to narrow. Indictments do not set policy, but they show how the government already thinks about what it is protecting. The numbers say the export-control regime leaks at a known corridor. The language says Washington has stopped describing these chips as consumer electronics.

Sources

  1. [1] DOJ indictment summary, citing DOJ press statement and Ars TechnicaRead source
  2. [2] Indictment details via Bloomberg reportingRead source
  3. [3] Case details via Courthouse NewsRead source
  4. [4] Context on Taiwan indictments via BenzingaRead source