What the indictment alleges
Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles arrested Greg Lui, 38, of San Gabriel on Thursday on a three-count indictment accusing him of smuggling more than $300m of export-controlled computer servers to China. The US Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California said a federal grand jury returned the indictment on 29 September, and that Lui was due to be arraigned on Friday in district court in downtown Los Angeles.
Lui owns Earthmade Computer Inc., a closely held company based in City of Industry, east of Los Angeles. According to the indictment, between 2023 and 2024 he and co-conspirators used Earthmade to buy high-end servers containing export-controlled graphics processors from US manufacturers, then shipped them to Malaysia and Singapore — destinations that need no Commerce Department licence — before the hardware was re-exported to China.
The indictment is an allegation. Lui is presumed innocent until the government proves its case.
The paperwork is the alleged crime
The mechanism described in the charging document is documentary rather than technical. Prosecutors say Lui gave US manufacturers compliance forms that named end users and destinations which did not require a licence, while knowing the servers were bound for China. Freight forwarders then moved the boxes to Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, and co-conspirators arranged the onward leg.
One sequence is laid out in detail. In January 2024, prosecutors say, Lui emailed a co-conspirator that a Malaysian transshipment company wanted 70 servers with restricted GPUs, attaching an export-compliance form acknowledging that those servers could not lawfully be transshipped to China. Later the same month he placed a purchase order with a US manufacturer for 27 of them, worth about $7,614,000, and the shipment went from Los Angeles to Kuala Lumpur with a packing list stating that the contents were export controlled. In March 2024, the indictment says, a co-conspirator emailed a Malaysian government official confirming that those 27 servers had been transshipped to a buyer in China.
Between January and October 2024, the government says, Earthmade received more than $176m from two Malaysia-based shipping companies.
Who is prosecuting, and what it carries
The case is being investigated by the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security, the Defense Criminal Investigative Service and the FBI’s Counterintelligence and Espionage Division. Assistant Attorney General for National Security John A. Eisenberg said the unsealed indictment detailed “false documents, staged dummy servers to mislead inspectors, and convoluted transshipment schemes”. First Assistant US Attorney Bill Essayli said the office would “aggressively prosecute those who put our national security at risk for profit”.
If convicted on all three counts, Lui faces a statutory maximum of 20 years for the export-control conspiracy, 20 years for the money-laundering conspiracy and 10 years for smuggling. Statutory maximums are ceilings, not expected sentences.
The Justice Department’s own release does not name Nvidia; it refers to GPUs made by companies specialising in what it calls “Super Intelligence” computing, the phrasing a recent executive order told federal agencies to adopt in place of “AI”. Bloomberg and Courthouse News both identified the hardware as Nvidia servers, with Courthouse News reporting H100 accelerators.
What to watch
Two things. The first is Friday’s arraignment and whether the government names the manufacturers and the Malaysian companies in open court, which would show how far up the supply chain the case reaches. The second is whether the forfeiture action — a separate assistant US attorney is handling seized property — recovers any of the $176m, since that figure, not the $300m of hardware, is the money the government says actually moved.
