Supermicro promised a new CFO in December 2024. A $2.5 billion smuggling case and a cofounder’s arrest later, it has one

Super Micro Computer , the troubled hardware ally of Nvidia and Elon Musk's SpaceX, has finally hired a new head of finance. The appointment comes nearly two years after a board-level independent investigation led the company to commit to "immediately" begin searching for a replacement for longtime chief financial officer David Weigand.

Mark Long, 59, replaced Weigand as CFO on Wednesday—"effective immediately," according to Supermicro—and he brings with him a stack of bona fides. He previously served as CFO and chief strategy officer at $130 billion data storage company Western Digital , and he runs an investment and advisory firm, Prime Impact Capital. Long also served a stint as co-CEO and CFO of a SPAC he cofounded that raised $300 million before it merged in 2023 with a Beijing-based auto insurance technology platform , Cheche Technology.

He joins Supermicro at an incredibly complex moment for the hardware maker with deep ties to Nvidia and its CEO, Jensen Huang, and Musk's xAI , which was folded into SpaceX. Long's record as a veteran executive and tech investor is likely intended to help clear the cloud that has hovered over Supermicro for the past two years and to burnish its credibility with skeptical investors.

In March, the Department of Justice and FBI indicted and arrested Supermicro cofounder Yih-Shyan "Wally" Liaw in a shocking smuggling case allegedly involving $2.5 billion of Supermicro hardware loaded with Nvidia's export-controlled chips being illegally routed to China. Liaw, along with two others associated with Supermicro, was alleged to have gone to extreme lengths to deceive officials, including using hair dryers to remove and replace sticky labels and staging thousands of dummy servers that were nonworking physical replicas of actual Supermicro servers—because the real servers had already been diverted to China.

Supermicro is not named as a defendant in the case, and has said it is cooperating with law enforcement. Liaw has pleaded not guilty. His March arrest, however, kicked off another board-led internal investigation—separate from the previous probe that led to the CFO search—that Supermicro said in August found no evidence that current members of senior management knew about the smuggling scheme.

Until he resigned after being arrested and charged in the smuggling case, Liaw had served on the Supermicro board and had a long history with fellow cofounders Charles Liang and Sara Liu. (Liu and Liang are married and both serve on the Supermicro board.) Liaw had previously left Supermicro in the midst of an internal audit committee investigation just before a 2018 SEC probe charged Supermicro and its then-CFO with improper revenue recognition practices. Supermicro settled the SEC's charges and paid a $17.5 million settlement in 2020. Liaw returned to Supermicro as a consultant in May 2021 and eventually became a full-time employee before rejoining the board in December 2023.