Nine indicted over AI server exports

Nine people, including employees of Nvidia and Super Micro, have been indicted over illegal exports of artificial intelligence (AI) servers to China, the Keelung District Prosecutors’ Office said yesterday. Semiconductor powerhouse Taiwan is the world’s largest producer of advanced chips used in AI applications. Prosecutors this year investigated the suspected illegal export of servers equipped with Nvidia chips subject to US export controls. Washington has imposed curbs since 2022, making it illegal for such semiconductors to be exported or sold in China without a license. Photo: Reuters Eight people, including one employee of Nvidia’s Taiwan unit and two employees of Super Micro’s Taiwan unit, were charged with breach of trust and document forgery in connection with the illegal export of high-end AI servers, Keelung prosecutors said in a statement. Neither company immediately responded to requests for comment. A ninth defendant was charged in a related case involving the alleged siphoning of funds from a distributor company involved, the statement said, without providing the full names of any of the defendants. The alleged scheme involved making it appear that 130 B300 servers ordered from Super Micro would be installed and used at a rented server facility in Taiwan. Prosecutors said false end-user documents stated that the servers would be installed in Taiwan. Of those 130 servers, 74 were ultimately exported and delivered to Chinese customers through routes that included direct shipments to China, as well as transshipments through Indonesia, Japan and Hong Kong, they said. The remaining 56 servers were intended to be exported to a company in Japan, prosecutors said, but Taiwanese customs officials detected irregularities and stopped their export. The prosecutors said the defendants were “fully aware” that Nvidia and Super Micro have “rigorous internal control procedures” regarding exports. However, the defendants “colluded with one another at various levels for enormous profit, illegally exporting high-end servers, increasing corporate compliance costs, and severely damaging our nation’s international image,” they added. Taiwan has tightened export controls in the past few years to keep advanced technology and know-how from reaching China. Japan will conduct tests of hypersonic missiles and other projectiles on Australian soil, the two countries’ defense ministers said yesterday as they deepened military cooperation, including with a codeveloped laser system. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles said alongside his Japanese counterpart, Shinjiro Koizumi, in Canberra that the deal would see a “better and enhanced arrangement between Australia and Japan for Japan’s use of our missile ranges over the course of the next decade.” “We have spoken previously about Australia being able to provide strategic depth to Japan across a range of areas, but one of them is the use Ugandan immigration authorities have returned the passports of four Taiwanese after withholding the travel documents at Entebbe International Airport, Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Hsiao Kuang-wei (蕭光偉) said yesterday. After hearing about the incident, the ministry immediately instructed its representative office in Somaliland, which is responsible for affairs involving Uganda, to closely monitor the situation and work with the Uganda Taiwanese Chamber of Commerce to communicate with the authorities there, Hsiao said. The passports were returned to their holders on Wednesday local time, he said. The incident followed an earlier incident in which Ugandan immigration officials withheld the passports of two Taiwanese at China has completed the first phase of construction on Antelope Reef (Lingyang Reef, 羚羊礁) in the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), building an artificial island in the disputed South China Sea that analysts say will form part of its largest military base. Satellite images showed the reclaimed feature — which Taiwan also claims — in outline for the first time, with barges and dredgers having left after at least six months of work in the busy waterway. The completion shows the South China Sea as an increasingly militarized arena of competition between China and the US and its allies. “The northern part of A fire and subsequent explosion in a residential area in Tainan early yesterday injured 15 people and damaged 68 homes, the Tainan City Fire Bureau said. The bureau said it received a report at 1:12am yesterday that a pile of waste in a vacant lot in Annan District’s (安南) Haidian Road had caught fire and exploded, adding that it dispatched 144 firefighters and 53 firetrucks to battle the blaze and evacuate nearby residents. It took more than four hours to extinguish the fire, it said. The incident damaged 11 privately owned vehicles, as well as eight fire engines, one ambulance and two disaster