Overview
- Bloomberg identified the indictment’s unnamed buyer as Bangkok-based OBON, a firm tied to Thailand’s national AI effort.
- Reports say some servers sold to OBON ultimately reached Alibaba, though Alibaba denies any links or use of banned Nvidia chips and neither firm has been publicly charged.
- In March, the Justice Department charged three Super Micro–linked figures with routing U.S.-made servers through Taiwan and Southeast Asia into China.
- Prosecutors say the network moved about $2.5 billion in AI hardware across 2024 to 2025, with more than $500 million shipped between April and mid-May 2025.
- U.S. rules have restricted high-end Nvidia chips to China since 2022, and limited H200 approvals in January 2026 have tightened gray-market supply and pushed up server prices.