US Suspects Thailand's OBON Corp Helped Smuggle $2.5bn in NVIDIA Chips to Alibaba

US suspects Thailand's OBON Corp helped smuggle NVIDIA chips to Alibaba

US prosecutors believe a company at the centre of Thailand's national AI strategy helped move billions of dollars in Nvidia-equipped Supermicro servers into China, with Alibaba among the eventual customers, Bloomberg reported on Friday. The company is OBON Corp., a Bangkok-based AI infrastructure firm that has been a public partner of Thailand's National AI Strategy and that has positioned itself as a regional cloud and supercomputing provider. Bloomberg's sources identify OBON as the entity referred to in the March 2026 federal indictment of Supermicro co-founder Yih-Shyan "Wally" Liaw and two associates only as "Company-1". Liaw was arrested in March on charges of conspiring to violate the Export Controls Reform Act and faces up to 20 years on the lead count. Prosecutors say he and a "rotating cast" of brokers used the Southeast Asian intermediary to buy and re-route around $2.5bn of servers between 2024 and 2025, with falsified shipping paperwork, swapped serial numbers and dummy servers built to confound inspections. OBON has not been charged. Alibaba has not been charged. Both are characterised in Friday's reporting as ends of the diversion chain whose role US prosecutors are continuing to investigate. Neither company had commented at the time of publication. Three things move forward with Friday's piece. First, the geographic centre of gravity. The March indictment referenced Southeast Asia generically; naming a specific Thai company places the diversion route on the same map as a national AI policy that the US has otherwise treated as a partner programme. Thailand applied last year for chip-import allocations under Washington's tiered framework, on the implicit basis that its compute would not be re-exported. Second, the customer end. Alibaba's Aliyun cloud and DAMO research arm have been the most visible state-aligned buyers of frontier AI compute in China. The 2025 export-control rules placed Alibaba on watch lists that explicitly limit its access to top-of-stack Nvidia parts. If Bloomberg's sources are right, the company received them anyway, through a route designed to look like Thai sovereign demand. Third, the corporate exposure at Supermicro. The company has consistently described the indicted individuals as a small group acting outside its compliance regime. CEO Charles Liang restated that line publicly in May, after the company's audit committee opened an internal investigation. Friday's reporting does not name additional Supermicro employees, but it does sharpen the question of how the volumes involved cleared the company's own export-control checks for two years. The $2.5bn Supermicro indictment is the largest US enforcement action under the AI export-control regime so far, and the dollar number is partly a function of where Nvidia hardware now trades. Chinese grey-market prices for the B300 reaching $1m, roughly double sticker, demonstrates a market that supports very large arbitrage; the gap between US-allocated price and Chinese-cleared price is what funds the brokers and the freight forwarders who make schemes like this work. The case sits inside the broader US-China chip-equipment standoff. Washington has used both export controls and inbound-investment rules to slow Chinese access to advanced compute; the parallel White House push to stop AI-model distillation flowing the other way is the other front, aimed at preventing Chinese labs from reverse-engineering frontier models trained on US infrastructure. Each is hard to enforce in isolation, and harder when sovereign partner programmes are part of the channel. Hardware-level countermeasures have moved up the policy agenda accordingly. Proposals around hardware-level chip tagging, phone-home location verification and post-shipment audit rules have all gained traction with the working group reviewing the controls. None of those would have caught a paperwork-and-reflagging operation cleanly; they would have raised the operational cost of running one. The investigative thread now extends from Bangkok to Hangzhou, and the question puts on the agenda is whether the next round of controls will treat partner-state programmes as trusted recipients or as additional surfaces to verify. Liaw's case is scheduled for a status conference in early summer. Bloomberg's reporting suggests the prosecution may add new defendants as the OBON link is pursued. Thai authorities have not publicly commented on cooperation with the US investigation, although Thailand's Ministry of Digital Economy and Society has previously stated it expects partner companies to comply with export-control rules. For Supermicro, the immediate concern is not a new indictment but a deepening corporate-governance problem. The audit committee's internal review is open-ended, and the company has acknowledged that customer concentration in the Southeast Asia segment will be reassessed. Shares were down roughly 33% over the months following the March arrest. Friday's reporting did not move the stock materially in pre-market trading. For Nvidia, the case is closer to noise than threat. The company sells what it can ship under licence, and the prosecution treats the diversion as a downstream act.

US suspects Nvidia chips smuggled to Alibaba via Thailand, Bloomberg News reports

May 8 (Reuters) - A firm linked to Thailand's national AI initiative is suspected of helping smuggle billions of dollars' worth of Super Micro Computer servers containing advanced Nvidia chips to China, Bloomberg News reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter. The intermediary buyer was an unnamed Southeast Asian firm referred to by prosecutors as "Company-1", which Bloomberg identified as Bangkok-based OBON Corp, citing the sources. Alibaba Group Holding was among the end customers, the report added. Reuters could not immediately verify the report. Nvidia, Super Micro Computers and Alibaba Group also did not immediately respond to Reuters' requests for comment, while OBON could not be immediately reached. An Alibaba spokesperson told Bloomberg that the company has no business relationship with Super Micro, OBON or any third-party brokers mentioned in the indictment. In March, the U.S. Justice Department charged Super Micro co-founder Yih-Shyan Liaw, sales manager Ruei-Tsang Chang and contractor Ting-Wei Sun with running a scheme to route U.S.-made servers through Taiwan to Southeast Asia, where they were repackaged into unmarked boxes and smuggled into China. Prosecutors alleged the group moved at least $2.5 billion in U.S. AI technology, including more than $500 million shipped between April and mid-May 2025. Some of the $2.5 billion servers sold to OBON allegedly went to Alibaba, the report added. The United States banned the export of high-end chips from Nvidia to China in 2022 amid concerns that they could be used for military purposes, though it later approved sales of Nvidia's second-most powerful H200 chips in January this year under certain conditions. Separately, Super Micro shareholders sued the Silicon Valley server maker in March, accusing it of securities fraud by allegedly concealing its reliance on sales to China that violated U.S. export laws. (Reporting by Preetika Parashuraman in Bengaluru; Editing by Sumana Nandy)