Supermicro owes its rapid rise to $4 trillion Nvidia—but China smuggling allegations and a high-profile arrest could blow up the partnership

When Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang got onstage at an event in his native Taiwan in 2024 to talk about the future of AI and supercomputers with Supermicro CEO and cofounder Charles Liang, the familiarity between the two was obvious. 

“When we’re together, sometimes we speak Taiwanese, sometimes we speak Mandarin, and then when we disagree, we speak English,” Huang joked in English. 

Huang was there to give a keynote address alongside Liang, and the two marveled at stacked server racks as they slipped in and out of English to joke and compliment each other on their respective tech. 

“Very beautiful,” said Huang, as he gazed at a server. “Charles said that everything in here is Nvidia, for all the American citizens.”

At the time, their companies—located in San Jose and Santa Clara, about a 15-minute drive from each other in Silicon Valley—seemed in sync, and the two appeared jovial as they riffed in front of a packed crowd. But a high-profile scandal involving Supermicro has thrown a wrench into the tight relationship between the two companies, threatening a decades-long partnership that has made billions for each organization and helped power the AI boom.

In March, Supermicro cofounder Yih-Shyan “Wally” Liaw was arrested by federal agents in California on charges that he allegedly smuggled $2.5 billion worth of Nvidi...