(April 10): Hours after the United States charged a Super Micro Computer Inc co-founder with illegally smuggling billions of dollars’ worth of Nvidia Corp AI chips to China, shares of a little-known Shenzhen-based computing company plummeted by the daily limit of 20%.
Sharetronic Data Technology Co, which is setting up AI data centres across the Asian country, said immediately after the plunge that it complies with regulations for hardware purchases. The company also assured investors it doesn’t have “any business cooperation or relationship” with Super Micro.
Records filed with Chinese government agencies and reviewed by Bloomberg News suggest that Sharetronic procured hundreds of Super Micro systems containing high-end Nvidia chips, which have been banned from sale to and within China absent permission from Washington since 2022.
Two invoices from May and June of last year show sales from Sharetronic to a Shenzhen subsidiary of 276 SYS-821GE-TNHR servers, valued at 632 million yuan (US$92 million or $117.3 million). These are Super Micro systems that contain either Nvidia’s H100 or H200 processors, the standard for training and running AI models like ChatGPT until Nvidia launched its current line of products last year. It’s unclear from whom Sharetronic sourced the hardware. The Chinese firm’s stock slid almost 10% Friday in Shenzhen, making it the worst performer on the MSCI Asia Index.
While the volumes in question are relatively small — the biggest American and Chinese tech players are spending orders of magnitude more on servers for AI data centres — the documents provide a window into China’s demand for banned US chips. Sharetronic is one of dozens of smaller companies that rent AI servers to third parties, a common setup in China and elsewhere — and the firm has told Chinese regulators that it uses American hardware to fuel that business.
The invoices also raise questions about how exhaustively the world’s top tech companies track sales of their most sensitive products. Nvidia said in a statement that its “customers are under express instructions not to provide any controlled servers, support or service” without US approval, while Super Micro said it’s never sold products to Sharetronic and that the company isn’t a customer. Yet publicly-accessible records suggest that Sharetronic still managed to get its hands on banned gear.
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Washington has restricted sales to China of most AI processors, including the H100 and H200, as part of a yearslong effort to curtail technological development that could aid the Asian nation’s military. American authorities have ramped up enforcement of those rules in recent months, pursuing several smaller-scale cases before indicting Super Micro’s co-founder, Yih-Shyan “Wally” Liaw, in March. Liaw has pled not guilty to charges that he helped divert Nvidia-powered servers worth US$2.5 billion to China.
That March indictment detailed a sophisticated smuggling operation but left several key questions unanswered — including to whom the hardware ultimately went. Spokespeople for the US attorney’s office that’s handling the case, plus the Commerce Department agency assisting with it, declined to comment on whether Sharetronic is among the defendants’ unnamed Chinese customers.
Sharetronic, in an emailed statement, didn’t directly answer questions about the invoices. It reiterated that it doesn’t have “any business cooperation or relationship with Super Micro,” and declined to provide additional details on its equipment purchases or sales, citing client confidentiality.
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“The servers the company and its affiliates have purchased are used to provide clients with computing services, and all related assets have come from legal and compliant channels,” Sharetronic said. Its law firm issued a statement on its official WeChat account after the March 20 share plunge threatening to take legal action against individuals and entities that harm its interest or spread rumors.
Sharetronic, founded more than two decades ago in Shenzhen, is one of many Chinese tech companies pivoting into the AI data centre boom. Its efforts began with the 2024 launch of a joint venture called Guangzhou Fcloud Technology Co, which is focused on building high-performance computing infrastructure across the Asian country, according to FCloud’s website and an interview with Sharetronic’s chairman published by the state-owned Securities Times.
Toward the end of that year, FCloud secured a coveted designation as an Nvidia Cloud Partner, or NCP, for compute — one of only eight such companies in China, according to Nvidia’s website. Globally, 59 firms have won the certification, which means that Nvidia deems them capable of providing “robust, secure and energy-efficient infrastructures” for AI workloads. Two other NCPs, both in Southeast Asia, have drawn scrutiny for possible semiconductor trade violations.
After FCloud’s NCP designation, Sharetronic went on a spending spree. It issued procurement announcements for a total 32.2 billion yuan in hardware and sought significant bank loans along the way. That investment “will lay a solid foundation” for continued growth, Sharetronic chairman Geng Kangming has said, noting that the company’s expenditure is small compared to customer demand.
For the most part, Sharetronic hasn’t disclosed exactly which types of AI servers it’s buying. But its financing activity offers some visibility.
Last year, Sharetronic and two newly-created subsidiaries offered AI servers as collateral when seeking bank loans, submitting redacted versions of server purchase invoices to a credit agency overseen by China’s central bank.
Bloomberg matched those invoice numbers, issuance dates and total values to documents from a database managed by the State Taxation Administration. That yielded 17 complete invoices, which described servers worth around six billion yuan — roughly a fifth of the total volume Sharetronic said it planned to procure. The majority of that hardware was described only in generic terms.
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But the two invoices from May and June — documenting sales from Sharetronic to a subsidiary it had recently established — named two specific types of servers: the 276 Super Micro systems that use Nvidia H100 and H200 chips, plus a smaller batch of 32 Dell products dubbed the PowerEdge XE9680.
These servers are compatible with a variety of American chips, from Nvidia and other makers, meaning the product name alone doesn’t answer the question of which specific processors made their way into China. But all of the potential options were subject to US curbs by May 2025, when the invoice is dated.
Dell, in an emailed statement, said it found “no record of the alleged sales. If we determine that a customer has diverted our products or transferred them to an unauthorised location or customer, we take swift and appropriate action including termination.”
Nvidia didn’t directly answer questions about whether sales of banned AI servers by FCloud’s parent company, Sharetronic, would affect its NCP designation. Like all Chinese companies, FCloud would need approval from Washington and Beijing before acquiring any H200 servers, Nvidia said, referring to products it’s in the process of introducing to the Chinese market after President Donald Trump said he’d approve some licences.
Uploaded by Magessan Varatharaja
