Alibaba named in $2.5 billion Nvidia chip pipeline routed through Thailand to China

Billions of dollars in restricted American AI chips appear to have reached Chinese data centers through a single Thailand-based middleman that bought servers from US-maker Super Micro Computer. Bloomberg reports that the middleman was Bangkok-based OBON Corp — a firm linked to Thailand’s own national AI initiative — and that some of the servers ended up at Alibaba, one of China’s three largest cloud providers. Both companies deny wrongdoing. The reporting puts identifiable names on a pipeline that until now had been described in court filings only as “Company-1” and unspecified end customers.

The original indictment, unsealed earlier this year, charged Super Micro co-founder Wally Liaw and two others with conspiring to route $2.5 billion worth of Super Micro servers — fitted with Nvidia’s most advanced AI chips, including B200 and H200 GPUs — to China through an unnamed Southeast Asian shell. Liaw was arrested at his home, pleaded not guilty and resigned his Super Micro positions following the arrest. The company’s share price fell 33 percent on the news. The indictment alleges that more than $500 million of the servers shipped during a single six-week window — a stretch in which US export rules on advanced AI chips were being tightened.

Bloomberg’s identification of OBON Corp adds a new layer. According to the report, OBON is connected to Thailand’s state AI strategy — the kind of entity that, in theory, should be subject to enhanced due-diligence rather than serving as a transit point. Reuters independently confirmed the identification through its own sources.

The Alibaba angle is more tentative. Bloomberg’s sources say some of the servers reached Alibaba’s data centers, but the indictment itself does not name Alibaba, and US authorities have made no public accusation against the company. Alibaba told Reuters it has no business ties to Super Micro, OBON or any third-party broker named in the case, and said banned Nvidia chips have never been used in its data centers. Nvidia, for its part, said it expects its ecosystem partners to maintain strict compliance and that any diverted systems receive no service or support from the company.

Skepticism belongs here. Bloomberg’s identification rests on unnamed sources, not on a court filing. OBON Corp could not be reached for comment. The indictment leaves both OBON and Alibaba unnamed, which is consistent either with an ongoing investigation or with prosecutors not having enough evidence to charge. Either reading is plausible. What the case suggests, regardless, is that an alleged $2.5 billion export-control violation ran for nearly two years through one country whose AI ambitions depend on remaining a trusted partner of the United States.

Context matters for the chips themselves. Nvidia’s B200 and H200 are the silicon that powers frontier AI training. Without them, Chinese AI companies have to fall back on either Huawei’s domestic alternatives, which still lag behind on training workloads, or on Nvidia’s officially sanctioned export versions, which are deliberately hobbled. According to Morgan Stanley data cited by Reuters, Chinese AI models accounted for 32 percent of global token usage in March 2026, up from 5 percent a year earlier. The jump overlaps with the alleged smuggling window.

For Alibaba and OBON, the immediate stakes are reputational rather than legal — neither has been charged. For Super Micro, the case has already cost it a co-founder and roughly a third of its market value on indictment day. For US export-control policy, the bigger question is structural: if a $2.5 billion violation can run for two years through a single Southeast Asian intermediary, the gap is not legal but operational.

Liaw has been released on bail and is awaiting trial. Willy Sun, the contractor charged alongside him, remains in custody pending a detention hearing. Steven Chang, the third defendant, is still at large in Taiwan. The US attorney for the Southern District of New York, Jay Clayton, has signaled that additional indictments are possible as the investigation continues.