Feds Say an L.A.-Area Tech Owner Smuggled $300 Million in Nvidia Chips to China

Prosecutors say Greg Lui of Earthmade Computer in City of Industry routed Nvidia servers to China through Malaysia and Singapore.

A San Gabriel Valley computer company owner smuggled more than $300 million in Nvidia-powered servers to China, federal prosecutors say.

Greg Lui, who owns Earthmade Computer Inc. in the City of Industry, was arrested Thursday, October 1, 2026, the Los Angeles Times reported. The indictment, filed Tuesday in federal court in the Central District of California, says the buyer at the far end of the chain was the Chinese government.

The case turns on a stopover. Shipping this kind of server to Malaysia or Singapore takes no export license from the U.S. Commerce Department. Shipping it to China does. Prosecutors say Lui and unnamed co-conspirators gave chip makers paperwork naming end users in those two countries, then hired freight forwarders to carry the machines on to China.

The indictment leans on bank records and emails, the Times reported. One purchase order to a U.S. manufacturer covered 27 servers with Nvidia H100 chips, worth about $7.6 million. A packing list showed them leaving the Los Angeles area for Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital. Soon afterward, prosecutors say, one of Lui's co-conspirators emailed a Malaysian government official to report that all 27 had gone to China.

The money moved too, by the government's account. Prosecutors say Earthmade took in more than $176 million in 2024 from two shipping companies based in Malaysia as part of the scheme.

Lui faces three counts: conspiracy to violate export controls, outbound smuggling and conspiracy to commit money laundering. No attorney for him had been listed in court documents, and the Times said it wasn't able to reach him for comment. Bill Essayli, the first assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, said in a Justice Department news release, "We will aggressively prosecute those who put our national security at risk for profit."

The chips named in the case are the Nvidia A100 and H100. Neither is the Santa Clara company's newest, but both are strong enough for artificial intelligence work, and the H100, released in 2022, was built to run the large language models that write text and code and make images, video and audio.

It isn't the first case of its kind to come out of L.A. County. In August 2025, federal prosecutors charged Chuan Geng and Shiwei Yang, two Chinese nationals living in Southern California who ran ALX Solutions Inc., the Times reported. The government accused the pair of sending AI chips to China illegally, a haul it valued in the tens of millions of dollars. The figure prosecutors attach to Lui's case runs well past that. Ars Technica reported that his arrest is the latest in a continuing run of Nvidia chip-smuggling cases.

The rules those cases test have kept shifting. The U.S. first put chip-export controls on China in 2022, and Nvidia answered with weaker versions designed to stay legal there, which were later restricted as well. Some lawmakers want tighter curbs on tech exports to China, while chip companies including Nvidia and AMD have lobbied against restrictions.

President Trump relaxed some of those controls last year. Late last year, he said he'd let Nvidia offer its H200 chip to Chinese customers if the company handed over 25% of that revenue. Exports there remain heavily restricted.

Source: latimes.com, retrieved October 3, 2026.