Catenaa, Saturday, May 09, 2026- US suspects that Nvidia chips worth billions of dollars have been smuggled to Alibaba through an AI company in Thailand.
Bloomberg News reported that US prosecutors this year outlined a scheme in which Super Micro’s co-founder allegedly worked with an unnamed Southeast Asian company and a “rotating cast” of third-party brokers to divert the AI semiconductors in violation of US trade rules.
The Southeast Asian firm the prosecutors didn’t name, identified only as Company-1, is Bangkok-based OBON, the report said.
Some of the $2.5 billion worth of servers sold to OBON allegedly went to Chinese AI leader Alibaba.
The prosecutors laid out allegations detailing the overall operation in a March indictment that sent Super Micro shares into freefall, by far the most significant chip smuggling crackdown since Washington first restricted Nvidia sales to China in 2022.
The indictment doesn’t name OBON or Alibaba, and US authorities haven’t publicly accused them of wrongdoing.
“Alibaba has no business relationship with Super Micro, OBON, or any third-party brokers who may have been mentioned in the indictment in question,” a spokesperson for the Chinese company told Bloomberg. “We have no involvement in the alleged smuggling activities. We do not currently use, and have never used, any banned Nvidia chips at our data centers.”
A little-known company outside of tech circles, OBON is responsible for the creation of Siam AI, Thailand’s sovereign cloud champion, according to a May 2024 press release.
OBON said at the time that it would deploy Nvidia servers in a small data center in Bangkok, designed to “empower OBON to launch Siam AI Cloud and revolutionize the country’s AI roadmap.” Siam AI had been incorporated as a separate company four months prior.
Siam AI went on to win Thailand’s first official Nvidia Cloud Partner designation, and host Nvidia Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang at a splashy event focused on so-called sovereign AI.
“The most important part of artificial intelligence is the data. And the data of Thailand belongs to the Thai people,” Huang said during a December 2024 fireside chat with Ratanaphon Wongnapachant, Siam AI’s CEO.
Ratanaphon, the nephew of Thai billionaire and former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, was also the CEO of OBON through at least May 2024, according to the company’s press release, which cited Siam AI’s website as a place to find more information about OBON.
While the two companies’ paths have been intertwined and overlapping, it’s unclear whether OBON and Siam AI maintain any business relationship.
Ratanaphon said in a phone interview on Wednesday that he left OBON when he launched Siam AI and therefore couldn’t comment on US suspicions that OBON had smuggled chips to China. “I will only answer regarding Siam AI, which is that the company is not involved in this,” he said.
Siam AI released a separate statement on Saturday, after publication of this story, saying that the company “is committed to full adherence to all applicable US export and re-export control laws and regulations.”
