Greg Lui Charged: Alleged Smuggling of $300 Million in A100 and H100 Chips to China
The federal indictment against Greg Lui, a 38-year-old California entrepreneur, shows in concrete detail how export-controlled NVIDIA chips were allegedly purchased in the US, shipped via Malaysia and Singapore, and then on to China. At the same time, officials have told Bloomberg that NVIDIA overlooked unrealistic delivery figures — claims the company rejects.
In early October 2026, the Department of Justice announced that Greg Lui, 38, also known as "Yiu Kong Lui," of San Gabriel, California, had been arrested and charged with smuggling GPU servers worth more than $300 million to China, in violation of US export laws. The federal grand jury returned the indictment on September 29, and the first court hearing was set for Friday, October 3, at the US District Court in downtown Los Angeles, according to the DOJ press release reproduced by Edhat. Fox News aired footage of the federal arrest outside his company, Earthmade Computers in San Gabriel.
The case carries extra weight because it landed at the same time as Bloomberg published a major investigation — October 1–2, according to Northeast Times — in which officials and industry critics argue that NVIDIA should have caught warning signs such as implausibly large chip shipments to Southeast Asia. The indictment against Lui shows the mechanism of one alleged smuggling channel. Bloomberg's coverage points to what the authorities see as a systemic problem.
What Lui Is Charged With
Lui faces three counts, according to the DOJ text reproduced by Edhat: one count of conspiracy to violate the Export Control Reform Act and the Export Administration Regulations, one count of outbound smuggling, and one count of money laundering conspiracy.
The indictment describes Lui as the owner of Earthmade Computer Inc., a privately held technology company in the City of Industry, California. According to the charges, the company was used as a purchasing channel: Earthmade bought export-controlled goods, shipped them to Malaysia and Singapore, and the goods were then allegedly re-exported to China. Between January and October 2024, Earthmade is said to have received over $176 million from two Malaysia-based freight companies as part of the scheme.
The servers allegedly contained NVIDIA's A100 and H100 accelerators as well as graphics cards of the PNY GeForce RTX 4090 and GeForce RTX 5090 types, writes The Register, citing court documents. All of the chip types mentioned are export-controlled in the sense that they allegedly formed part of a scheme charged under the export rules.
How Long Did the Scheme Run?
Here the sources are not in agreement, and this deserves careful reading. The charges as described by DOJ and Edhat emphasize shipping data from January to October 2024. The Register, however, cites court documents in which the scheme allegedly began in or around October 2023 and is said to have continued until at least August 12, 2026. The difference may relate to different parts of the material covering different periods, but the source material provides no basis to resolve this. What is entirely clear is that all descriptions of Lui's actions are allegations in an indictment — he has not been convicted, and it is unclear whether he has a lawyer.
The Bigger Picture: 115,000 Chips and the OBON Case
The criticism of NVIDIA rests on Bloomberg's reporting, reproduced via Engadget/Yahoo, and it is considerably broader than the Lui indictment alone. Bloomberg reportedly learned that operators in western China are building dozens of data centers that could house 115,000 restricted NVIDIA processors, and that US officials, according to Bloomberg's sources, believe China has already smuggled in at least that many chips. This figure is attributed to sources, not independently verified.
Officials also point to a related case involving Super Micro and a Bangkok-based company referred to as OBON: roughly $2.5 billion in AI servers sold to the company allegedly ended up in China, and the conspirators are said to have used, among other things, a hair dryer to move serial number stickers to dummy servers. The critical point for NVIDIA, as officials present it in Engadget's reproduction of Bloomberg, is that the company should have noticed that OBON lacked the physical capacity — around 100 megawatts of data center capacity — to house the number of servers it purchased.
Daniel Remler, former head of AI policy at the State Department, framed the skepticism this way, quoted in Engadget/Yahoo: "I never felt we got a straight answer on how it is possible that so many chips are going to the Southeast Asia region if they're not serving customers in China."
NVIDIA's Response
NVIDIA rejects the characterization, and the company has never been accused of aiding smuggling. According to Engadget, the company says it has complied with the rules, and a spokesperson said: "A startup's growth plan in a friendly country is an opportunity for America, not a 'red flag' to fear."
That is the core of the disagreement: where officials see unrealistic delivery figures to Southeast Asia as a signal of diversion, NVIDIA sees growth plans among customers in friendly countries as legitimate and desirable. Where the line falls between a business opportunity and a warning sign that should be investigated remains unresolved — and no documentation has emerged that NVIDIA should have or could have stopped specific shipments in the Lui case.
The Official Framing
The Department of Justice frames the case as a security matter. John A. Eisenberg, Assistant Attorney General for National Security, said according to The Register that AI is the defining technology of the era, and that the National Security Division will "protect America's advantage in the chips that power this technology, a product of our unmatched innovation and hard work, from illegal diversion by our economic and military adversaries."
The message is that enforcement of export controls on AI chips has become a priority for federal prosecutors — and the Lui indictment is an example of the toolkit: export control violations, smuggling, and money laundering in combination.
What Remains Unclear
Much remains outstanding. All descriptions of Lui's alleged scheme are allegations in an indictment that has yet to be tested in court. The criticism of NVIDIA rests on named and unnamed sources via Bloomberg and secondary reproductions, and the company disputes that it overlooked anything. The figure of 115,000 smuggled processors and the claims in the OBON case are attributed reporting, not established facts. And the timeframe of the scheme itself — 2023–2024 per the DOJ account, potentially through August 2026 per the court documents The Register cites — has not been clarified in the available material.
What is certain is the chronology: the indictment was returned on September 29, the arrest was announced on October 1, the court hearing was set for October 3, and Bloomberg's coverage appeared October 1–2. The case is in motion, and both prosecutors and NVIDIA have strong stakes in how it is framed: as an isolated indictment of one entrepreneur, or as evidence that one of the world's leading chip suppliers has a blind spot in export controls.