Taiwan Adds AI Servers to Export Controls, Five-Year Prison Terms

Taiwan is adding AI servers and the latest chips to its list of controlled exports, Bloomberg reported. Once the rules take effect, smuggling those items becomes a crime under Taiwan's Foreign Trade Act, with up to five years in prison, a fine of around ninety two thousand five hundred dollars, or both. Taiwan's Minister of Economic Affairs, Kung Ming-hsin, said some of Taiwan's measures on controlled items will correspond to American ones, part of the commitments in the trade agreement under which the United States cut tariffs on Taiwanese goods to fifteen percent. Until now, Taiwan has not treated AI chip exports to China as a crime, so suspected smugglers had to be charged under other laws, as Singapore did with fraud and money laundering charges.

The pressure has been building. United States authorities accused three Super Micro employees, including co-founder Wally Liaw, of smuggling two and a half billion dollars of AI servers, and Taiwanese authorities later raided Super Micro's Taipei offices in a probe of Nvidia B300 chips that led to nine indictments. Beijing has already condemned Taipei over earlier restrictions on Huawei and SMIC. The full story is on intelligencedisrupt dot com.