TAIPEI (Taiwan News) —The US Department of Justice arrested the Taiwanese American co-founder of Super Micro, Wally Liaw Yih-shyan (廖益賢), on charges of violating export controls by shipping high-value AI technology to China.
Liaw and two other Taiwanese citizens were indicted for falsifying documents, misleading inspectors, and violating US export-control laws to deliver hundreds of servers containing sensitive AI technology to China. Liaw and Sun Ting-wei (孫廷偉), identified as a “fixer,” were arrested on Thursday after the indictments were unsealed, while a third suspect, Chang Rue-tsang (張瑞滄), is still being sought, per a DOJ press release.
Super Micro, based in San Jose, California, manufactures high-performance GPU computing systems. It owns a manufacturing facility at Taoyuan’s Science and Technology Park, the Taiwanese subsidiary Ablecom, and, in recent years, has also opened a plant in Malaysia.
Liaw has served as the senior vice president of business development at Super Micro since 2022. Liaw’s scheme reportedly involved the shipment of servers from the US to the facility in Taoyuan, where they were repackaged, then sent to Company-1 in Southeast Asia, according to the indictment.
This company was used as an intermediary to conceal the real destination of the restricted AI servers, valued at billions of dollars. Together, they allegedly misled inspectors by submitting “dummy” products that were not the actual products designated for sale and export.
Company-1 reportedly ordered over NT$80 billion (US$2.5 billion) worth of servers from the US Super Micro facility between 2024 and 2025. Investigators found that between April and May 2025, a number of servers valued at NT$16.2 billion (US$510 million) were delivered to China in violation of US export law.
The DOJ’s indictment notes that the AI technology is essential to safeguarding US national security. The Department of Commerce has implemented strict export controls for technologies bound for China or Hong Kong.
