Federal agents arrested a San Gabriel man on October 1 and accused him of running a $300 million side door around U.S. chip export controls — through Malaysia and Singapore, on paperwork that never said China.
Greg Lui, also known as Yiu Kong Lui, 38, owns Earthmade Computer Inc. in the City of Industry, California. Prosecutors say that from 2023 through 2024 he and co-conspirators bought high-end servers packed with export-controlled Nvidia graphics processors, shipped them to Malaysia and Singapore — jurisdictions that did not require the same U.S. licenses — using false documents, then re-exported the machines to China. Earthmade received more than $176 million from Malaysian shipping companies, the Justice Department said. Lui was expected to appear in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles.
He faces conspiracy to violate the Export Control Reform Act and the Export Administration Regulations, outbound smuggling, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. Conviction on the package can mean more than 20 years in prison. The FBI described the sales as American super-intelligence hardware reaching the Chinese government. Nvidia has faced repeated questions in Washington about whether it missed diversion red flags as controls tightened around advanced accelerators.
The second-order leak is logistics, not the model weights. Export rules assume the first billed destination is the last. A California assembler with a Malaysian freight account is a simpler bypass than a smuggled die. If $300 million of servers can leave Los Angeles County as lawful Asia-bound cargo, the binding constraint on China's training clusters is not the Entity List. It is who checks the second flight.
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