A California CEO Is Charged With Smuggling More Than $300 Million of Nvidia GPU Servers to China

A federal grand jury in Los Angeles has indicted Greg Lui, the 38-year-old owner of City of Industry company Earthmade Computer Inc., on three counts over what prosecutors say was a scheme to smuggle more than $300 million worth of export-controlled servers with Nvidia GPUs to China. Lui was arrested on Thursday, October 1. The Justice Department’s press release, Ars Technica and The Register gave the headline facts. The primary document is the 22-page indictment in United States v. Lui, No. 2:26-cr-00618, returned on September 29 in the Central District of California. An indictment is an allegation, and Lui is presumed innocent.

We read it against the coverage. The mechanism matches what was reported, but three details differ from the headline: how much money the document itemizes, which dates it gives, and who it says was deceived.

What the indictment alleges

The counts are conspiracy to violate the Export Control Reform Act and the Export Administration Regulations, outbound smuggling, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. The Justice Department lists maximum sentences of 20 years on the export conspiracy count, 20 on the money laundering count and 10 on the smuggling count.

The method, in the indictment’s telling: Earthmade bought servers containing Nvidia A100 and H100 GPUs, plus RTX 4090 and RTX 5090 GPUs, from three unnamed U.S. manufacturers, “by falsely claiming that the end users of the servers were located in countries that did not require export licenses.” Freight forwarders shipped them to Malaysia and Singapore, where no license was needed, and two Malaysian companies then moved them on to China. The indictment notes that under the export regulations Hong Kong is “generally treated as any other city in mainland China.” It says neither Lui nor Earthmade ever applied for or received a license from the Commerce Department (paragraph 25). The smuggling count itself names only A100 and H100 servers (paragraph 53).

On the money, the indictment says that from January to October 2024 Earthmade received over $80 million from the first Malaysian company and $96 million from the second, which the Justice Department rounds to “more than $176 million.” The first company is described as one “established on or about October 22, 1999, and primarily focused on the lumber, plywood, millwork, and wood panel industries”; the second as “a front company.” The buyer at the end of the chain is “a Chinese industrial company based in Hangzhou, China,” also unnamed.

The document lists five unindicted co-conspirators by role only. They include a sales manager at one of the manufacturers who “approved the sale of high-end technology to Earthmade,” an executive at a U.S. freight forwarder, and the first Malaysian company’s “purported Chief Technology Officer,” who the indictment says “in reality was an international broker of export-controlled servers.” The manufacturers, forwarders, Malaysian companies and the Chinese buyer are all identified by role, not by name.

The transactions it describes

The narrative section walks through four episodes, all in 2024. The table gives each with the value the indictment states, if any.

Our arithmetic: $7.6 million, $13 million and more than $22 million add up to at least about $42.6 million.

Where the headline and the document differ

The total. The Justice Department’s release says “more than $300 million.” The indictment’s own paragraphs vary: the introduction says “over 300 million dollars’ worth,” paragraph 32 says “hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth,” and paragraph 36 says Earthmade “brokered the sale of almost three hundred million dollars’ worth” of servers. The Register used “around $300 million” and “almost $300 million” in the same article.

What is itemized. The three transactions that carry a value, the 27-server order, the June purchase and the 100-server order, total at least about $42.6 million, roughly 14 percent of $300 million. Indictments summarize and do not have to list every shipment, so this says what is public, not how strong the case is. It does mean the larger figures rest on records the public text does not break down.

The dates. The release says “From 2023 to 2024.” The indictment’s introduction says “Beginning in 2024,” while its overview runs from “not later than in or around October 2023” until “at least August 12, 2026” (the first two counts use the same window), and the money laundering count runs from “no later than February 28, 2024” through “at least in or around December 13, 2024.” Every dated shipment and order in the narrative falls between January 11 and July 2, 2024, and the public text does not say what happened on August 12, 2026. Earthmade itself was established “on or about November 10, 2023,” so the charged start date comes before the company existed. Ars Technica’s dates, October 2023 to August 2026, follow the overview; the release follows the narrower window. Both can be right, because a conspiracy count can outlast the episodes an indictment describes, but a reader quoting how long the scheme ran is quoting different parts of one case.

The vocabulary. The release does not name Nvidia and describes the servers as used for “Super Intelligence (SI) applications.” The indictment says “artificial intelligence applications” and names Nvidia as the GPU maker.

Who the indictment says was deceived

According to the indictment, the false statements went to the U.S. manufacturers and into export filings. Paragraph 50 says the conspirators made “false statements, material misrepresentations, and omissions in EEI filings and related financial, shipping, and end-user related documents and records” and “caused fraudulent classification designations to be listed in EEI filings.” EEI, or Electronic Export Information, is the declaration an exporter or its agent must file for exports valued at $2,500 or more and for any export that needs a license, according to the indictment’s background section.

Nvidia appears in the indictment only as the maker of the GPUs. The document alleges no statement made to Nvidia and lists no Nvidia employee among the co-conspirators; the one manufacturer insider it describes is the sales manager at U.S. Manufacturer 1. That differs from the Taiwan case we covered in August, in which prosecutors indicted nine people including employees of Nvidia and Super Micro. The U.S. indictment does not mention that matter.

Nvidia’s position, and a scale check

Questions about Nvidia’s own due diligence, as Ars Technica summarizes Bloomberg’s investigation, center on other cases: a Taiwanese facility, a data center in Thailand and a customer called Megaspeed. The indictment says nothing about Nvidia’s checks. We could not open the Bloomberg article, so what follows is Ars’s account of it. Ars reports that an Nvidia spokesperson told Bloomberg the share of products allegedly diverted to China is “less than one half of one percent,” and quotes the spokesperson saying governments and media “have found insignificant diversion of controlled US products,” which the spokesperson called “a drop in the bucket compared to the ocean of domestic compute China already has.” On the other side, Ars says officials around the world suspect “hundreds of thousands of AI chips” are moving through a “sprawling shadow trade.”

For scale only: $300 million is about 0.15 percent of the $193.7 billion of data center revenue Nvidia reported for fiscal 2026 (its results release says that figure rose 68 percent), and about 0.26 percent of the roughly $115 billion that implies for fiscal 2025, which includes most of 2024. Server prices cover more than GPUs, and Ars’s quotation does not say what Nvidia measured its share against, so this does not test the company’s claim. If the share is measured against Nvidia’s data center sales, one alleged operation of this size would fit inside “less than one half of one percent” with room to spare, so a single prosecution cannot settle whether the uncharged volume is large. That uncharged volume is what the officials in Ars’s summary suspect is big.

What is on the docket

The Justice Department said Lui was “expected to make his initial appearance and be arraigned this afternoon,” meaning October 1. The CourtListener docket, which says its contents come from PACER and RECAP and may not be up to date, shows entries dated October 1 labeled “Indictment,” “Case Summary (CR-72),” “Complex Case,” “Seal Document” (twice), “Memorandum by US Attorney,” “Request for Detention” and a notice of appearance by counsel. Only the indictment was available without a PACER purchase, so we cannot say what the government asked for in the detention request, whether a judge ruled on it, or how Lui pleaded. The Register said it contacted Earthmade and Nvidia for comment, and its article carries no reply from either.

Our reading

This is a paperwork case. By the indictment’s account, several documents were candid about what was being shipped: a packing list that named “27 servers with H100 Nvidia GPUs” and a buyer form acknowledging the export rules. The deception it alleges sits elsewhere, in the end-user and end-destination claims made to the manufacturers, the export filings and the identities used. The Justice Department says Lui knew the true end users were in China. A lumber and plywood company ordering H100 servers is the kind of mismatch customer screening exists to catch, although the indictment does not say what the manufacturers knew about the Malaysian company’s business or who they believed the end user was. That is our inference, not an allegation.

What to watch:

• The unnamed manufacturers. Whether prosecutors identify the three U.S. manufacturers or charge the sales manager the indictment describes as a co-conspirator.
• A superseding indictment. The charged period runs to August 12, 2026, but the narrative stops in July 2024; a later indictment could itemize more.
• The court record. What the court does with the request for detention, and what Lui pleads.