According to a court document found by Court Watch, federal prosecutors have charged four individuals with illegally smuggling NVIDIA (NVIDIA) GPUs from the United States to China, as well as HP supercomputers equipped with NVIDIA GPUs. Currently, t...
According to a court document found by Court Watch, federal prosecutors have charged four individuals with illegally smuggling NVIDIA (NVIDIA) GPUs from the United States to China, as well as HP supercomputers equipped with NVIDIA GPUs.
Currently, the U.S. government has imposed restrictions on NVIDIA and banned the export of the most powerful AI training chips to China. However, Chinese companies have still successfully built competitive AI models. In this regard, Scale CEO Alexander Wang believes that despite export controls, China has far more NVIDIA H100 chips than the outside world imagines.
According to the documents, only one person has been arrested, and the remaining four people are facing charges of smuggling, conspiracy, money laundering, etc. These four people are Mathew Ho, Brian Curtis Raymond, Tony Li, and Harry Chen. They are suspected of conspiring to export GPUs since the end of 2023, including the shipment of 50 H200s and multiple H100s, none of which obtained an export license.
Judging from the documents, these individuals used the shell company Janford Realtor, LLC as an intermediary to transport multiple unlicensed advanced U.S. GPUs to China. Among them, U.S. citizen Mathew Ho is the company’s registered agent, while Chinese national Tony Li is the company manager.
Bryan Curtis Raymond claims to be the CEO of AI infrastructure Bitworks, which can provide sales and support services for NVIDIA and AMD solutions. It is currently speculated that Janford Realtor paid nearly $2 million to purchase GPUs from Raymond and his company and used forged documents and contracts to circumvent export controls.
NVIDIA spokesman John Rizzo pointed out that NVIDIA’s export system is strict and comprehensive. Even small quantities of used products sold in the second-hand market will be subject to strict scrutiny. Trying to piece together a data center using smuggled products is neither technically nor economically feasible. Data centers are large and complex systems. Any smuggling is extremely difficult and high-risk. The company will not provide any support or maintenance for restricted products.
Feds charge four with illegally smuggling Nvidia AI chips to China Further reading: Lenovo downplays concerns about AI bubble, confident in managing memory shortage Only through passing can you chat! Roblox plans to launch facial recognition age verification, launching in New York, Australia and the Netherlands in December
