Two Chinese nationals and two Americans have been arrested for allegedly illegally exporting cutting-edge Nvidia chips with artificial intelligence applications to China, the Justice Department said Thursday.
The two Chinese nationals are Cham Li, 38, residing in California, and Jing Chen, 45, who is on an F-1 nonimmigrant student visa and resides in Tampa, Florida, the department said. The two Americans are Hon Ning Ho, 34, who resides in Florida, and Brian Curtis Raymond, 46, who resides in Alabama. The four men are charged with conspiring to violate the Export Control Reform Act and money laundering. It wasn’t immediately clear if they had lawyers who could speak on their behalf.
Justice Department officials allege that the four conspired to illegally export advanced Nvidia graphics processing units, or GPUs, to China through Malaysia and Thailand.
The defendants engaged in a “deliberate and deceptive effort to transship controlled Nvidia GPUs to China by falsifying paperwork, creating fake contracts, and misleading U.S. authorities,” Assistant Attorney General John Eisenberg said in a statement.
They allegedly received nearly $4 million from China to help finance the export scheme, the department said.
Some 400 Nvidia A100 GPUs were exported to China between October 2024 and January 2025 in two shipments, the department said, and two other shipments were “disrupted by law enforcement and therefore not completed.”
The Justice Department said that despite knowing licenses were required to export the items to China, none of the defendants sought or obtained a license for any of the exports.
The Justice Department said China is seeking cutting-edge U.S. technology to further its goal of becoming the world leader in AI by 2030.
Violations of the Export Control Reform Act and money laundering are each punishable by up to 20 years in prison, if there’s a conviction.
Nvidia reported earnings of $31.9 billion on record revenue of $57 billion for the third quarter this week.