News is making the rounds today that the government of Taiwan has indic ted nine people, including an Nvidia staffer only named as “Chang,” as being involved in a scheme to allow for the shipment of several dozen export-restricted Nvidia chips to China.

In general, the sale of some Nvidia hardware to China is illegal. But only the newest stuff, really. If you’ve been following this for the last couple of years, like I have, you know that the rules are extremely detailed, and change frequently. Reportedly, at one point, Jensen Huang was having dinner with Trump to try to get some of these restrictions relaxed. And export laws have changed on a dime. For instance, right now, sellers can ship H200s to specific Chinese companies, including Alibaba and others, which have their own caps on volume. So maybe 7500 H200s are legal and the 7501 st one is not. As for the H20, its export status went back and forth in 2025, as U.S. officials waffled on exactly what hardware should be controlled, and how. So it’s not just “illegal to export Nvidia chips” to China. It’s more complicated than that.

With that in mind, maybe it’s not hard to imagine that millions of dollars worth of banned Nvidia exports enter the Middle Kingdom each month. Buyers can use intermediaries or front companies to purchase Nvidia GPUs or GPU-equipped servers, claim that the equipment is destined for a legitimate customer somewhere outside China, and bring it in from places like Singapore, Malaysia or Thailand, with ersatz business records. They can falsify end-user certifications, or mislabel GPUs as ordinary computer equipment, removing identifying labels. All of this makes comprehensive enforcement of the export controls virtually impossible.

“If Nvidia could not detect and prohibit non-China customers from allegedly illegally diverting GPUs bound for Southeast Asia to China, it is extremely implausible that it can meet existing end user/use control requirement for chips shipped directly to China,” wrote legislators Liz Warren and Jim Banks in a letter expressing related concerns. “Nvidia’s due diligence responsibilities under the EAR cannot be waived or outsourced. American export controls exist to protect American national security. They only work if the companies subject to them follow the law and meaningfully, aggressively monitor their supply chains. We are concerned that the recent Supermicro indictments raise serious questions about Jensen Huang’s public assurances and the Department of Commerce should treat them accordingly.”

Correspondingly, in the recent intervention by Taiwan, I found reports that the U.S. had done something similar, around the same area of the industry, back in March, with the U.S. Justice Department indicting Yih-Shyan “Wally” Liaw, Ruei-Tsang “Steven” Chang, and Ting-Wei “Willy” Sun, alleging a conspiracy to divert U.S.-assembled AI servers to China using false documents, dummy servers and transshipment schemes.

As for Taiwan’s enforcement, it’s true that, in taking these actions, Taiwan is cooperating with the U.S. export-control regime, but technically, prosecutors are using Taiwanese law to prosecute conduct that occurred within Taiwan.

China’s Domestic Production

The furor around Nvidia shipments to China is really part of the gamesmanship as the two greatest superpowers in the modern world duke it out on AI. U.S. leaders are hoping that starving the Chinese of the best AI-optimized chips will hobble its national ambitions and military acquisition of cutting-edge systems.

But it seems that the Chinese are developing solutions based on their own domestic production. The use of Huawei Ascend chips is one such strategy, where Chinese operators can string more of these processors together to try to emulate what they would have done with restricted Nvidia hardware, to some extent.

“Huawei, at the forefront of efforts to develop home-grown technology, said at an annual customer event in Shanghai that it would launch new ‘superpods’ in late 2026 and late 2027,” writes an unnamed AP reporter . “That’s computer industry lingo for a group of interconnected computers that, in Huawei’s case, combines the power of thousands of chips.”

Superpods, eh? These reports underscore the tenacity of design engineers in getting around the kinds of challenges caused by the export controls.

One thing’s for sure – we’ll continue to see this international drama play out, as nations work to build their own supply chains, and, as in the case with Greece, their own models using their own languages and cultural backdrops, so that they are not dependent on some other country’s technology. It’s a quickly changing world, and all of this competition is front and center for those who are trying to forecast what things will look like in a few years.