Just now, the Chinese founder was arrested! US$2.5 billion in AI chips were outflowed, and SMCI plummeted 30%!

In shocking news released by the U.S. Department of Justice on Thursday, federal agents arrested prominent Silicon Valley executive Wally Liaw.

Wally Liaw, the co-founder of Super Micro Computer, was accused of illegally transferring servers equipped with Nvidia’s high-end AI chips through complex channels.

Super Micro Computer (SMCI for short) is a company that makes servers and data center hardware, headquartered in Silicon Valley, USA.

Its core positioning is not to manufacture chips, but to “install AI chips like Nvidia into servers” and sell them to cloud manufacturers and enterprise customers. To put it simply, it is an “assembler of AI computing power infrastructure”.

The two people indicted together with Liaw were Steven Chang, the general manager of AMD Taiwan, and a third-party person.

The U.S. Department of Justice claimed that between 2024 and 2025, Liaw was directly involved in the alleged conspiracy and cooperated with others to find buyers.

The core of this case is not just “selling servers”, but the core Nvidia advanced AI chips inside these servers.

Server manufacturers like Super Micro Computer are at a key node in this supply chain.

This case is considered an important signal for the U.S. government to escalate law enforcement.

After the news was announced, Super Micro Computer’s stock price plummeted nearly 30% intraday, with the latest price at $21.55, one of the largest declines in recent years.

Investors are worried not only about corporate governance risks, but also about a new round of uncertainty that the entire AI hardware supply chain may face.

As the demand for artificial intelligence exploded in the past two years, Super Micro Computer’s performance once grew rapidly, revenue doubled, orders surged, and the stock price also reached a high around 2024, becoming one of the star companies in the field of AI hardware.

It has increased by more than 800% in the past five years, and once reached a historical high of about $118 in 2024.

Behind this high growth is also accompanied by obvious hidden concerns, such as low profit margins, high cost pressure, and reliance on a single supply chain (especially Nvidia), making the market always doubtful about its long-term stability. From 2025 to 2026, the company’s stock price began to fluctuate violently, falling significantly from its high level.

The stock price will probably hover around $30 in March 2026.

The company’s founder and CEO, Charles Liang, is a typical “Chinese engineer’s entrepreneurial path in Silicon Valley.”

He received a master’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Texas at Arlington in his early years. After graduation, he entered Silicon Valley and started as a basic hardware engineer. Unlike many Internet entrepreneurs, he took a “very hard-core” route – focusing on low-level fields such as servers, motherboards, and data centers, but with extremely high technical thresholds.

1993,Charles LiangFounded Super Micro, which was initially a small company making motherboards. At that time, the industry was monopolized by giants such as Dell and HP. He chose a differentiated route: not to fight for brand, but to fight for “customization + speed.”

In other words, when customers (such as cloud vendors) need specially configured servers, Super Micro can design, produce and deliver them faster than large companies. This model was not eye-catching at the time, but with the rise of Internet companies and cloud computing, it has become a huge advantage.

As Nvidia GPU becomes the core of AI training, the market demand for high-performance servers has exploded, and Super Micro is stuck in this key position. It not only understands hardware design, but also can quickly cooperate with chip manufacturers to develop complete machine solutions. Therefore, this company suddenly exploded in 2023-2024, and was called the “AI shovel seller” by the market.

However, in 2018, the company was delisted by Nasdaq due to financial reporting issues and experienced a crisis of confidence before being relisted.