Supermicro's Co-Founder Used a Hair Dryer to Pull Off a $2.5 Billion GPU Heist

A 71-year-old executive, thousands of dummy servers, and a hair dryer. That's how $2.5 billion worth of Nvidia AI chips allegedly ended up in China. The Scheme Wally Liaw co-founded Super Micro Computer in 1993. Three decades later, federal prosecutors say he masterminded one of the largest export control violations in U.S. history. The DOJ indictment, unsealed March 19 in Manhattan federal court, lays out an operation that ran through 2024 and 2025. Liaw and Supermicro's Taiwan general manager Ruei-Tsang "Steven" Chang allegedly found Chinese buyers hungry for Nvidia GPU servers — the same hardware the U.S. government has been desperately trying to keep out of Chinese hands. The playbook: route orders through an unnamed Southeast Asian shell company. On paper, the servers were going to that company's operations. In reality, they were repackaged into unmarked boxes and shipped straight to China. During one three-week stretch in spring 2025, roughly $500 million worth of servers crossed