Super Micro ‘fixer’ pleads guilty to diverting AI tech

A man charged along with Super Micro Computer Inc co-founder Yih-Shyan “Wally” Liaw (廖益賢) of conspiring to send cutting-edge chips to China in violation of US export controls pleaded guilty, court documents said.

Ting-Wei “Willy” Sun (孫廷瑋), a former outside contractor described by US authorities as a “fixer” who allegedly aided in the sales, pleaded guilty on Thursday at a hearing in federal court in New York as part of an agreement with prosecutors, court filings showed.

Prosecutors claimed the men were part of a scheme to send Nvidia Corp-powered servers to an unnamed Southeast Asian company and then divert them to Chinese customers.

The Super Micro Computer Inc offices in Taoyuan are pictured on July 2.

Photo: Lam Yik Fei, Bloomberg

The charges came in a high-profile crackdown on alleged smuggling of restricted artificial intelligence (AI) technology to China. Super Micro said in August, following an independent probe, that its current senior management had no knowledge of the purported scheme.

A sentencing date was scheduled for Sept. 8 next year.

Liaw has pleaded not guilty in the case. The US also charged Ruei-Tsang “Steven” Chang (張瑞滄), who served as a general manager in Super Micro’s Taiwan office. Chang has not appeared in the case.

The scheme allegedly involved efforts by the defendants and others to evade scrutiny by auditors from Super Micro and the US government — including by falsifying records and setting up “dummy” servers to which they affixed serial numbers with a hair dryer, an indictment said.

San Jose, California-based Super Micro is not named as a defendant in the case. Asked for comment on the guilty plea, the company referred to its prior statements and said it was cooperating with the government’s investigation.

“We have taken action against all identified employees and those parties no longer have any relationship with Supermicro,” Super Micro chief executive officer Charles Liang (梁見後) said in a public letter to stakeholders in March. “Mr. Wally Liaw has also resigned from the company’s board of directors,” he said.

Washington has restricted sales of advanced AI chips to China, citing national security concerns. The indictment said Nvidia’s B200, H100 and H200 graphics processing units, and servers containing them, were subject to the restrictions.