Plot to send GPUs to China leads to indictment
Four men have been indicted on federal criminal charges related to a plot to export Nvidia chips worth millions of dollars to China and Hong Kong in violation of tight U.S. restrictions, court documents show.
One of the defendants, Brian Curtis Raymond, a 46-year-old resident of Huntsville, Alabama, was identified last week as the chief technology officer of an artificial intelligence cloud company in Virginia that announced plans for a merger that would allow its stock to be publicly traded.
That company is not implicated in the case, and told CNBC that his job offer has been rescinded.
Raymond and the other three defendants, all of whom were born in China or Hong Kong, are charged with conspiracy to violate the Export Control Reform Act of 2018 in connection with the export and attempted export of the Nvidia chips to end users in China and Hong Kong, after first shipping the chips to Malaysia and Thailand.
The defendants had not obtained a license or authorization for such exports from the Commerce Department, according to the indictment.
Chips sent to China as part of the alleged scheme, which began in September 2023, included Nvidia’s A100 and H200 graphics processing units and Hewlett Packard Enterprise products, according to the indictment filed on Nov. 13 in U.S. District Court in Tampa, Florida.
The chips are highly restricted from exports because of their use in artificial intelligence and supercomputing applications, the indictment notes.
The indictment was first reported by CourtWatch, the court document aggregation news site founded by counterrorism researcher Seamus Hughes.
The indictment notes that China “is rapidly developing exascale supercomputing capabilities and has announced its intent to be the world leader in AI by 2030.”
“These capabilities are being used by the PRC [People’s Republic of China] for its military modernization efforts and in connection with the PRC’s weapons design and testing, including for weapons or mass destruction,” the indictment says.
Raymond owned a technology products distributor company in Huntsville, which was “licensed to sell Nvidia GPUs [graphics processing units], among other products,” the indictment says.
Raymond’s LinkedIn page says his company, Bitworks, is or was a “Nvidia Cloud Partner delivering H100, H200, and coming Blackwell / NVL72 clusters for customers.”
Raymond and another co-defendant in the case, Mathew Ho, would “cause freight forwarded to chip Nvidia GPUs to third countries, knowing that the GPUs were ultimately destined for and would be transhipped to the” People’s Republic of China, the indictment alleges.
Ho, a 34-year-old who was born in Hong Kong, is a U.S. citizen who lives in Florida. He is also known as Hon Ning Ho.
Ho was the registered agent of a company in Tampa called Janford Realtor, which, despite its name, was never involved in any real estate transactions, but instead “served as an intermediary for several unlawful and unlicensed exports to” China of the advanced…