Yih-Shyan "Wally" Liaw, 71, of Silicon Valley conspired with 53-year-old Ruei-Tsang "Steven" Chang and 44-year-old Ting-Wei "Willy" Sun of Taiwan to smuggle computer servers containing high-performance Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs) to China, prosecutors contend.

"The defendants participated in a systematic scheme to divert massive quantities of US artificial intelligence technology to customers in China," US attorney Jay Clayton said in a statement.

"They did so through a tangled web of lies, obfuscation, and concealment."

The company that employed the three defendants, Super Micro Computer, said the employees violated its policies and controls with the scheme.

Yih-Shyan Liaw was a senior vice president of business development and on the company's board of directors, Ruei-Tsang Chang was a sales manager in Taiwan, and Ting-Wei Sun was a contractor, according to Super Micro.

"The company has been cooperating fully with the government's investigation and will continue to do so," it said.

The trio conspired with others starting about two years ago for the sale of at least $2.5 billion worth of computer servers routed to China despite US export controls barring their sale in that country without proper licenses, according to the indictment.

The scheme involved a "pass-through" company based in Southeast Asia used to obscure where the servers packed with Nvidia GPUs were actually going, prosecutors maintain.

Falsified documents were used to hide the trail to China, and non-working "dummy" replica servers were kept in stock to fool auditors, according to the indictment.

Ting-Wei Sun was described in the filing as a "fixer" who worked with others to conceal the scheme.

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