Title is incorrect. Articles say that Wally Liaw is a co-founder, not the current CEO. But $2.5B is a lot of gear so trying to pin this on 3 dudes going rogue is pretty far-fetched IMHO.
IIRC it was generally known that GPUs were being smuggled into China via intermediaries. Still super reckless of SM to bring that in-house. If you’re gonna do shady shit at this level, you simply can’t get caught.
Only Trump is allowed to sell Nvidia chips to China. Like when the UAE gave him $2 billion so they could be the intermediary to sell them to China.
Jensen Huang must have signed off on Nvidia sharing a cut of the China sales with the U.S. government. This is pretty outrageous, since Diaper Don loves to divert payments through ME banking where he presumably does private business. But obviously his team did the math, and when your gross margins are the envy of the entire world, you can afford the mafia vigorish.