Seven months after his initial arrest for allegedly conspiring to smuggle Nvidia AI chips into China, Ting-Wei “Willy” Sun has pled guilty to four counts.

Sun entered the pleas in a Manhattan federal court on October 9. The charges he’s admitted to include conspiracies to violate export controls, smuggle goods, defraud the US, and obstruct justice.

His sentencing date has been scheduled for September 8, 2027.

Sun was one of three Supermicro workers whom the US government charged with illegally smuggling Nvidia GPU servers into China. The indictment claims that some $2.5 billion in servers were shipped to China, despite Supermicro lacking a Commerce Department license.

The accused included Supermicro’s co-founder, Yih-Shyan “Wally” Liaw, who resigned from Supermicro’s board of directors following his arrest. In early April, he pled not guilty to the charges in a Manhattan federal court.

At the time of the arrests, prosecutors allege that the scheme involved the defendants repackaging Supermicro servers into unmarked boxes to disguise the contents and using ‘dummy’ replica servers to fool audits. Surveillance footage shows individuals using a hair dryer to move serial numbers from real servers to dummy servers. The defendants then used a company based in Southeast Asia as a “pass-through entity” to ship the chips from Taiwan to China using third parties.

According to the indictment, the pass-through entity became one of Supermicro’s largest customers in 2024, accounting for $99.7 million in revenue in the final quarter of that financial year.

No charges have been brought against Supermicro, and earlier this year, the company publicly declared it was “committed to protecting our advanced technologies and intellectual property,” revealing in a statement that it had been working “closely with the Taiwanese authorities” to prevent the "illicit diversion of our highly sought-after systems into the restricted China market.“

As a result of the collaboration, the authorities have seized 50 servers that had been “deceptively acquired after being sold by Supermicro to an authorized reseller,” the company said at the time.

Following reports that its Taiwanese office was raided in June 2026, the company published an open letter stating that the authorities had confirmed that Supermicro “is not the target of this investigation,” adding that its offices in Taiwan were not in fact raided by any government authorities, as was “widely misreported.”

However, the company did confirm that four of its employees in Taiwan had been detained for questioning with regard to the company’s sale of products to an unnamed technology firm in the country, and that Supermicro had cooperated with authorities to provide access to the desks and electronic devices of those workers.

Two of the four employees have been detained pending a hearing, while the other two have been released on bail.