One indictment named $2.5 billion in diverted chips. The agents chasing them number 247.

Every advanced AI accelerator chip leaving the United States for China needs a federal export license, on the government's own finding that the computing power involved is a matter of national security.▸ Two cases unsealed within four months of each other show what that license requirement is up against, and who is left to enforce it.

On March 19, 2026, prosecutors in the Southern District of New York unsealed an indictment charging Yih-Shyan "Wally" Liaw — a co-founder and board member of Supermicro, identified in the filing as "the U.S. Manufacturer" — along with Taiwan-based general manager Ruei-Tsang "Steven" Chang and broker Ting-Wei "Willy" Sun.▸ The allegation: the three directed a Southeast Asia-based company to place orders for AI servers, had them assembled in the U.S. and shipped through Taiwan, then had a logistics firm repackage them in unmarked boxes and route them on to China — while staging "thousands of 'dummy' servers," non-working physical replicas, to fool the manufacturer's own compliance inspectors.

Between 2024 and 2025, DOJ alleges, that front company purchased approximately $2.5 billion worth of servers from Supermicro.▸ The scheme accelerated: "between late April 2025 and mid-May 2025 alone, at least approximately $510 million worth" of those servers were diverted to China, according to the indictment. U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton for the Southern District of New York put it plainly in the DOJ release: "Diversion schemes like those disrupted today generate billions of dollars in ill-gotten gains and pose a direct threat to U.S. national security." Liaw and Sun were arrested; Chang remains a fugitive. The charges are allegations — none of the three has been convicted.

Five months earlier, on December 8, 2025, DOJ announced the takedown of a second network under "Operation Gatekeeper."▸ Alan Hao Hsu and his company, Hao Global LLC, pleaded guilty to smuggling and unlawful export activity: between October 2024 and May 2025, according to court documents, Hsu "knowingly exported and attempted to export at least $160 million worth of export-controlled Nvidia H100 and H200 Tensor Core" GPUs to the PRC, Hong Kong, and other destinations, using falsified shipping paperwork to conceal the true recipients. DOJ says it seized more than $50 million in Nvidia hardware and cash in the investigation. Assistant Attorney General John Eisenberg framed the stakes in the same release: "These chips are the building blocks of AI superiority... The country that controls these chips will control AI technology; the country that controls AI technology will control the future," a line echoed by U.S. Attorney Nicholas Ganjei of the Southern District of Texas. Hsu faces up to 10 years in prison at sentencing.

Both cases were built by the FBI, DOJ, and the Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) working together — but BIS is the one agency mentioned in name in both releases, and its enforcement arm is the one licensed to investigate export violations on the ground.▸ In a report published June 26, 2025, the Government Accountability Office found that BIS's Export Enforcement (EE) staff — the field agents who make cases like these — grew from 171 positions in FY2013 to 247 in FY2024, a 44% increase. Over the same period, BIS's licensing arm, Export Administration (EA), barely moved: 217 positions in FY2013 to 218 in FY2024. Bureau-wide, BIS grew from 403 to 585 funded positions, and its appropriations rose "by about $97 million (104 percent)" — funding that GAO found was concentrated in FY2022–23, driven mostly by the response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine and a new supply-chain security office, not by AI-chip enforcement specifically.

GAO's core finding wasn't just that growth was slow — it's that BIS doesn't plan for more of it.▸ The bureau "does not have a long-term workforce plan to determine its resource needs," GAO wrote, and instead sets staffing levels annually through the budget process; the last bureau-wide workforce assessment was conducted in 2016, before generative AI, before the H100, before either case described here existed.

Dollar figures for the Supermicro-linked network reflect DOJ's allegations in an unsealed indictment, not a conviction; figures for Operation Gatekeeper reflect an entered guilty plea. Staffing and funding figures cover the full Bureau of Industry and Security, not export-enforcement spending specifically, since no public source breaks out enforcement funding on its own.