Feds charge four with illegally smuggling Nvidia AI chips to China

Federal prosecutors have charged four people with illegally smuggling Nvidia GPUs and HP supercomputers with Nvidia GPUs from the US to China, according to a court filing spotted by Court Watch. The US government has placed restrictions that prevent Nvidia from selling its most powerful chips for AI training to China, but Chinese companies like DeepSeek have still created competitive AI models. After DeepSeek released its R1 model earlier this year, Scale CEO Alexander Wang said he thinks China has far more of Nvidia’s H100 AI chips than people may think, despite the export controls, and operations like this may help explain how. 

Nvidia, which reported quarterly earnings of a record $57 billion in revenue on Wednesday.

According to the documents, only one person has been arrested so far, while the four are facing charges including smuggling, conspiracy, and money laundering. The four people charged — Mathew Ho, Brian Curtis Raymond, Tony Li, and Harry Chen —  allegedly conspired to export the GPUs starting in late 2023, including shipping 50 of Nvidia’s coveted H200 GPUs, and several batches of the earlier H100 GPUs without a license.

The filing explains that one part of the scheme was an alleged front company called Janford Realtor, LLC:

Despite its name, Janford Realtor, LLC was never involved in any real estate transactions. Instead, the company served as an intermediary for several unlawful and unlicensed exports to the People’s Republic of China (“PRC”) of advanced and highly-controlled U.S.-origin Graphics Processing Units (“GPUs”) with artificial intelligence (“AI”) and supercomputing applications.

Ho, a US citizen, was the registered agent of the company, and Li, a Chinese national, was identified as a manager of the company.

Bryan Curtis Raymond of Huntsville, Alabama, is listed in the filing as the CEO and sole owner of “U.S. Company 1,” which was paid nearly $2 million by Janford Realtor. On his LinkedIn, Raymond says he is the CEO of Bitworks, which he describes as an AI infrastructure company that “provides sales and support for Nvidia and AMD solutions,” and in another post said he was recently hired as CTO for another AI cloud computing company, Corvex. Ho and the other co-conspirators bought GPUs from vendors, including Raymond and his company, using money sent via wire transfer from bank accounts in China, while using fake shipping letters and contracts to evade export controls.

“The export system is rigorous and comprehensive,” Nvidia spokesperson John Rizzo says in a statement to The Verge. “Even small sales of older generation products on the secondary market are subject to strict scrutiny and review. Trying to cobble together datacenters from smuggled products is a nonstarter, both technically and economically. Datacenters are massive and complex systems, making any smuggling extremely difficult and risky, and we do not provide any support or repairs for restricted products.”