California man charged with smuggling $300 million in restricted AI hardware to China

Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles charged Greg Lui, 38, with conspiracy to violate export control law, outbound smuggling, and money laundering conspiracy, alleging he funneled $300 million in export-controlled Nvidia-powered servers to China via Singapore and Malaysia from 2023 through 2024. Lui, who ran Earthmade Computer Inc. in the City of Industry, allegedly told U.S. manufacturers the hardware was bound for countries requiring no export license, then rerouted it to Chinese customers once it landed overseas.

The restricted gear reportedly included the Nvidia H100, the market's most powerful AI-focused GPU with 80 billion transistors, used for training language models, self-driving systems and medical diagnosis tools. A similar case last year charged two Chinese nationals in Southern California with running the same Singapore-Malaysia routing scheme for tens of millions of dollars worth of Nvidia chips.

First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli framed the case as protecting 'America's national security' and keeping 'Super Intelligence technology' from adversaries, two days after a Trump executive order instructed federal agencies to replace the term 'artificial intelligence' with 'super intelligence.' No attorney was yet listed for Lui in the court docket.

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