- Lead. Greg Lui, 38, owner of Earthmade Computer in California’s San Gabriel Valley, was arrested on 1 October on a federal indictment alleging he led a multi-year conspiracy to smuggle more than $300 million in export-controlled servers containing Nvidia GPUs to China, routing the equipment through Malaysia and Singapore to obscure its final destination.
- Fact. Prosecutors allege that Earthmade received over $176 million from Malaysian shipment companies between January and October 2024, and that Lui and five co-conspirators provided false documentation to US manufacturers claiming the servers would go to permissible end users.
- Stake. The indictment is the largest GPU smuggling prosecution to date and illustrates how export controls — which restrict the sale of advanced Nvidia chips to China — have created a lucrative black market with transshipment nodes in Southeast Asia that regulators have struggled to close off.
Greg Lui, also known as Yiu Kong Lui, was arrested on 1 October following a federal grand jury indictment on three counts: conspiracy to violate the Export Control Reform Act and Export Administration Regulations, outbound smuggling, and money laundering conspiracy. The Justice Department published the case on its website, describing Earthmade Computer — based in the City of Industry, California — as a technology company Lui used to acquire export-controlled servers containing high-end graphics processing units manufactured by US companies specialising in accelerated computing. The DOJ indictment covers conduct from 2023 to 2026.
How the Scheme Allegedly Worked
Prosecutors allege that Lui and five co-conspirators purchased export-controlled servers in the United States and then shipped them to Malaysia and Singapore using false documentation that identified permissible end users as the buyers. Once in those transit countries, the equipment was re-exported to China — the actual final destination that US export rules prohibit without specific licences. Between January and October 2024 alone, Earthmade received more than $176 million from Malaysian shipment companies, a volume prosecutors characterised as consistent with a commercial operation built around circumventing controls rather than legitimate trade.
The GPU models cited in media reporting on the case include Nvidia’s RTX 4090, RTX 5090, A100, and H100 chips — the same categories of accelerated computing hardware that the US government has progressively restricted from export to China since 2022. The H100 and A100 are the workhorses of large-language-model training; the RTX 5090 is Nvidia’s current top consumer-grade GPU, which offers inference performance comparable to some data-centre chips at a lower cost. All are restricted under Commerce Department rules that treat them as dual-use technology with significant military applications.
A Pattern of Enforcement
The Lui case follows a widening US enforcement effort against semiconductor diversion networks. The Commerce Department has been tightening export licensing procedures, while the Justice Department has pursued prosecutions of individuals and intermediaries who use Southeast Asian transshipment to defeat controls. Beijing’s parallel response has included tightening controls on outbound movement of AI talent and their families — a move that reflects how seriously Chinese authorities treat the risk of talent migration at a moment when GPU access is constrained. If convicted on all three counts, Lui faces a maximum of 20 years on each of the two conspiracy charges and 10 years for the smuggling count. Plea negotiations, if they occur, will likely turn on the extent to which Lui provides information about the broader network, which prosecutors allege involved at least five co-conspirators across multiple countries.