News that several universities in China, including two with links to the Chinese military, have acquired or are looking to acquire Supermicro servers with Nvidia A100 GPUs, comes in the wake of two high-profile cases in the past two weeks of Supermicro employees and contractors being arrested for smuggling and attempting to smuggle servers with more advanced GPUs.
Servers from Supermicro featuring Nvidia GPUs were acquired by four Chinese universities over the last year, according to a new report by Reuters.
The news comes after the U.S. Department of Justice handed out two indictments in the last two weeks charging Supermicro employees and partners, but not Supermicro itself, for smuggling and attempting to smuggle that company’s servers to China via Thailand in violation of U.S. export laws prohibiting the sale of advanced U.S. technology sales to that country.
Reuters on Friday reported that, according to publicly available tender documents from 2025, an additional two China-based universities also attempted to buy Supermicro servers. The first, Beihang University in Beijing, has links to China’s PLA, or People’s Liberation Army. The second, Harbin Institute of Technology, works on missile, satellite, and robotics technologies, Reuters said.
[Related: Accelerating AI Boom Drives Supermicro to Record Q2 Revenue Growth]
The servers in question, designed for AI applications, feature Nvidia A100 GPUs. The A100 GPUs originally became available in May of 2020, and availability ended in early 2024. And, according the U.S. Congress, the U.S. implemented export controls on Nvidia A100 and H100 GPUs.
As a result, it is possible the servers called into question in the Reuters report were shipped to China legally.
CRN has reached out to Beihang University and Harbin Institute of Technology for comment.
Neither Supermicro nor Nvidia responded to CRN requests for further information by press time.
News about the use of Supermicro servers with Nvidia GPUs comes at a sensitive time.
Last week, Yih-Shyan “Wally” Liaw — a co-founder, board member, and senior vice president of business development at Supermicro — along with a Taiwan-based Supermicro employee and a third-party contractor were indicted for allegedly shipping $2.5 billion worth of servers assembled in the U.S. with Nvidia GPUs via Taiwan to another company where they were repackaged prior to shipping to their final destinations in China. Liaw, who was arrested, resigned from Supermicro’s board of directors.
That was followed this week with news about the indictment and arrest of two U.S. citizens who appear to be IT solution provider executives, along with a Hong Kong national, for conspiring to ship servers with Nvidia GPUs via a Thailand company with their eventual destination being China.
