--- title: "Nine Charged In Taipei. 384 Of The Accelerators Never Reached China." dek: "The Taipei docket lists 1,104 serial numbers. Prosecutors account for 720 of them. This newspaper traced part of the rest to a bonded warehouse, a mail drop above a shoe repairer, and a Nevada substation whose customer has no name." kind: investigation (Investigation) desk: The Signal author: Dev Rajagopal and Harriet Kwon-Massey (fictional) published: 2026-08-25T22:10:00Z url: https://theyburied.com/article/sixty-one-serials-in-nye-county tags: Taiwan, Nevada, export control, Nye County, serial numbers, data centres genre: satire status: fiction — nothing in this story happened; every person, source and document is invented --- # Nine Charged In Taipei. 384 Of The Accelerators Never Reached China. *The Taipei docket lists 1,104 serial numbers. Prosecutors account for 720 of them. This newspaper traced part of the rest to a bonded warehouse, a mail drop above a shoe repairer, and a Nevada substation whose customer has no name.* The charges filed in Taipei on 20 August come with an annex, and the annex is a table of 1,104 serial numbers. Prosecutors account for 720 of them. Their own tracing puts those units with a consignee in Shenzhen, which is the case they intend to try. The other 384 left the docket at a bonded warehouse in Hong Kong on 14 April and the charges say nothing further about them. Sixty-one of those 384 are in Nye County, Nevada. > **Figure:** One export, two legs — see https://theyburied.com/article/sixty-one-serials-in-nye-county ## What is and is not alleged in Taipei Nine people were charged last week over accelerators exported from Kaohsiung on 4 March to a buyer in Shenzhen. Two of the nine work for hardware manufacturers. This newspaper is not naming them or their employers, because that case has not been tried and it is not this story. What is useful to us is procedural. Under Taiwanese practice the serial schedule goes on the public docket with the charges. It went up on 20 August. It is a table, in a machine-readable file, requiring no request, no fee and no lawyer. ## What we did with it We put all 384 unaccounted serials through the two manufacturers' warranty-lookup pages. These are consumer-facing services. They exist so that a buyer of second-hand equipment can check what they have bought. Sixty-one serials returned a warranty transfer, recorded in April, to a service address in Reno. The Reno address is a mail-forwarding box on the first floor above a shoe repairer. It has forwarded, according to the carrier's dispatch sheets, eleven consignments between 29 April and 3 July, all to one parcel of land in Nye County. > It is a table. Somebody had to open the attachment. > > — Dev Rajagopal, on how much of this took four days ## The parcel The assessor's file describes 34 hectares, one improvement of 9,200 square metres completed in 2013, and a mailing address that is the Reno box. Our correspondent drove to the gate on 21 August. The building has forty-eight dry coolers on its roof, of which thirty-one were running at eleven in the morning at an air temperature of 34 degrees. There is no sign, no logo and no name on the mailbox. The gate intercom was answered. The voice asked who we were and then said nothing further, and we left after nine minutes. The site's power comes off a single substation, energised in 2012. Its interconnection record shows a contracted load of 118 megawatts and, where the customer name should be, the word *withheld*. ## The part that is duller than it looks There is nothing illegal, anywhere in this chain, that we can point at. Re-manifesting a pallet in a bonded warehouse is a normal operation with its own paperwork, and the forwarder we spoke to in July described it to us in detail and correctly. A mail drop is a mail drop. A confidential interconnection is a filing right the utility's customers have held since 1997, and the utility's counsel makes that case at length below, and makes it well. The story is not that a rule was broken on the second leg. It is that the second leg exists, that nobody was looking at it, and that the instrument for looking at it was a public table and a web form. ## What this desk takes from it Export control is enforced at the border. Once goods are past it, the enforcement stops and the only remaining trace is a number stamped on a casing, printed in an annex nobody reads. We read the annex late. The wire had the charges within four hours and the trade press had the mechanism within a day, and between them they had every part of this story except where the machines went. The 61 matches, with query timestamps, are published with this piece. So are the 323 failures. If a reader with better access can match one more, we will print it, and if they can show that a match of ours is wrong, we will print that on the front page. ## Sources (invented) - The public docket, Taipei, Charges and Annex C, 1,104 serial numbers — Downloaded from the court's own portal; no request was needed and none was made (20 August 2026) - Two manufacturer warranty portals, Public serial-lookup services — Queried with each of the 384 serials in turn; every query timestamped and screenshotted (20–24 August 2026) - A freight forwarder, Hong Kong, Handled the April re-manifest — Forty-minute telephone interview; contemporaneous notes filed as PX-1938 (12 July 2026) - Great Basin Power & Light, Load-serving utility, southern Nevada — Written questions 18 August; reply received 23 August (August 2026) - Nye County Assessor, Parcel and improvement records — Bought at the counter for fourteen dollars (21 August 2026) ## Documents cited (invented) - PX-1938: https://theyburied.com/vault/PX-1938 ## What we could not confirm - What the machines are doing. We have a power draw, a thermal plume off the dry coolers measured from a public road, and no access. Nobody has told us it is a data centre and nobody has told us it is not. - Who arranged the second leg. The charges in Taipei do not allege it. We asked the prosecutors' office twice whether they had traced the 384 and were told the annex speaks for itself, which it does, and which is not an answer. - The other 323 serials. We could not match them and we are not going to imply that we did. They may be in Shenzhen. They may be in a warehouse. Our figure is 61 and it will stay 61 until somebody adds to it. ## Right of reply **Ilona Braithwaite-Osei, general counsel, Great Basin Power & Light** (Replied in writing and asked that the reply run whole. Printed unedited.): > Your questions rest on a misunderstanding that I would like to correct before it hardens into a fact in other newspapers. > > An interconnection record that does not print a customer name is not a record of a customer who has no name. It is a record from which a name has been withheld under a confidentiality provision that has been in our tariff since 1997, that was approved in public, and that any of our customers may invoke by writing one letter. Roughly forty of them have. Most of them are casinos. > > I cannot tell you which one this is. I can tell you that the account exists, that it is billed monthly, that it has never been in arrears, and that we would disconnect it tomorrow for non-payment exactly as we would disconnect a house. > > You also did not ask us for the waiver process, which is published, and under which we will approach a customer on a journalist's behalf and put the request to them. We have done it eleven times. Four said yes. I would have run it for you and I would still run it, and I am aware that saying so after you have gone to print is worth less than saying it before. > > One correction you will want, because it cuts against me. Your draft says the substation was energised in 2012 and implies the load arrived with it. The account is older than the substation. It has been a customer of this utility since 1994, served from a different feeder, and it was moved when the new plant came in. I would rather you printed that than have you learn it from somebody who would enjoy telling you. --- They Buried is a satirical newspaper. Every story, source, document and person in it is invented. It reports from a fictional world in which the conspiracy theories are true, with the method of a real daily.