Supermicro stock fell 12% at the open on Thursday after Bloomberg reported, citing an anonymous source, that federal investigators are examining whether entities linked to Alice Huang helped smuggle Supermicro hardware containing Nvidia GPUs into China. The report landed days after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang resigned following revelations of an affair with Alice Huang, who is not related to him.

According to Bloomberg, the Department of Justice is running multiple probes into Nvidia: one antitrust investigation and two focused on Megaspeed — where Alice Huang was a former top executive — and on Super Micro Computer. Separately, the U.S. Attorney's Office in Manhattan is investigating whether Alice Huang-linked entities participated in alleged efforts to move Supermicro servers loaded with Nvidia's top-end GPUs into China. It remains unclear whether that probe connects to smuggling cases already brought in the U.S. or Asia. Neither Jensen Huang, Nvidia, nor Supermicro has been formally charged with any wrongdoing.

Why does Supermicro keep surfacing?

Much of the speculation around Jensen Huang's downfall has centered on Megaspeed, the Singapore firm that reportedly became one of Nvidia's largest buyers in Southeast Asia. But Supermicro, the San Jose server maker run by Charles Liang — Jensen Huang's friend of three decades and a key Nvidia partner — has been under export-control scrutiny for years and is being pulled along with Nvidia. The two CEOs shared stages at Computex in Taiwan, where Jensen was photographed with Alice at a cocktail bar in 2024.

In March, federal prosecutors charged Supermicro co-founder Yih-Shyan "Wally" Liaw and two others with routing roughly $2.5 billion in servers containing Nvidia H200 and B200 GPUs to China through a Southeast Asian front company. Bloomberg later identified the front company as OBON, a Bangkok-based AI infrastructure firm that has not been charged. Supermicro was not charged and says it was a victim of the scheme.

Liaw resigned his executive and board roles immediately after his arrest and has pleaded not guilty. His trial was pushed to March 2027 after his lawyers told the judge that subpoenas issued to Supermicro could be material to his defense. His attorney, Nelson Boxer, declined to comment. Co-defendant Ting-Wei "Willy" Sun pleaded guilty in October, including to deleting an encrypted messaging app from his phone on the day of the arrests. Sun's attorneys did not respond to a request for comment, and it is unclear whether he has a cooperation agreement with the government.

What did Singapore say?

No public evidence yet directly connects the Supermicro and Megaspeed cases, but the threads are multiplying. On Thursday, Singapore's Ministry of Home Affairs said the Singapore Police Force and Customs had opened investigations into Megaspeed and Alice Huang, and sought information from Supermicro. Supermicro offered only "limited cooperation," Singaporean authorities said.

In a July 2025 meeting, Singapore officials raised the issue with U.S. authorities and asked for help securing Supermicro's cooperation, repeating the request to the Justice Department and the FBI on several occasions. "Despite these repeated requests, Singapore has to date received limited information or assistance in respect of the company," the ministry's statement reads. Supermicro did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

How deep does the compliance record go?

Supermicro's export-control troubles predate Liaw's arrest. In 2006, the company pleaded guilty to illegally exporting computer equipment to Iran through a Dubai distributor — mirroring the basic scheme alleged in the Liaw case.

Liaw himself has survived crises before. He left Supermicro in 2018 amid a board-led investigation tied to the company's Nasdaq delisting and an SEC accounting probe that ended with a $17.5 million settlement in 2020. He returned as a consultant in May 2021, became a full-time employee, and rejoined the board in December 2023.

In 2024, short seller Hindenburg Research accused Supermicro of accounting manipulation and export-control failures; the company denied the allegations. Ernst & Young then resigned mid-audit, saying it could no longer rely on management's representations. A special committee recommended in December 2024 that CFO David Weigand be replaced, and the company agreed to do so "immediately" — but did not name a successor until October.

The Liaw indictment describes thousands of nonworking dummy servers staged in warehouses to fool auditors, contractors using hair dryers to peel off serial-number labels, and a compliance auditor who was off-site during an inspection allegedly enjoying "entertainment" paid for by another company. It also shows how the alleged scheme fed Nvidia's supply pipeline: in December 2024, Liaw allegedly told the front company that "the only way" to secure Nvidia B200 allocations was to create monthly forecasts. Nvidia is not accused of wrongdoing in that indictment.

After Liaw's arrest, Supermicro's board opened its own investigation, overseen by independent director Scott Angel and former audit committee chair Tally Liu. In August, the company said the probe found no evidence that current senior management knew of the alleged scheme, but it resulted in an unspecified number of terminations across sales, business development, and technical support for policy and code-of-conduct failures. Supermicro has disclosed a grand jury subpoena covering the Liaw case and its compliance program, plus subpoenas or inquiries from the SEC, the Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security, and foreign authorities.

Who holds Supermicro together now?

Through it all, the Nvidia relationship has held. New CFO Mark Long, the former Western Digital finance chief who took over from Weigand last month, joined CEO Liang on the latest earnings call, where Supermicro reported record fiscal first-quarter revenue of $19.9 billion — well ahead of Wall Street consensus — and raised its full-year forecast to $72 billion to $82 billion.

But Supermicro is losing its most important champion in Jensen Huang. Liang built the company's AI-era business on that relationship and Supermicro's speed in bringing the newest GPUs to market. Nvidia will be led in the interim by Colette Kress, while former acting SDNY U.S. Attorney Joon Kim and Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz run an outside investigation into the foreign intelligence operation. Nvidia reports third-quarter results on November 17, and House lawmakers have requested a closed-door session with Huang the following day. In January, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is likely to lead the Senate Banking Committee with subpoena powers; she sought answers from Nvidia on Supermicro and chip smuggling in June and renewed the request this week.