Federal prosecutors have charged four individuals with illegally smuggling Nvidia GPUs and HP supercomputers equipped with Nvidia GPUs from the US to China, as detailed in a court filing reviewed by Court Watch. The US government has imposed restrictions on Nvidia, preventing the sale of its most advanced chips for AI training to China. Nevertheless, Chinese companies like DeepSeek continue to develop competitive AI models. Following the release of DeepSeek’s R1 model earlier this year, Scale CEO Alexander Wang expressed his belief that China possesses more Nvidia H100 AI chips than typically assumed, despite existing export controls, which might shed light on operations like these.
Nvidia recently reported an all-time high quarterly revenue of $57 billion. According to court documents, only one of the four charged has been arrested thus far. The accused face a range of charges, including smuggling, conspiracy, and money laundering. The individuals involved—Mathew Ho, Brian Curtis Raymond, Tony Li, and Harry Chen—are said to have conspired to export GPUs starting in late 2023, including the shipment of 50 of Nvidia’s highly sought-after H200 GPUs, along with multiple batches of the earlier H100 GPUs, all without the necessary licenses.
The filing details one element of the operation that involved a purported front company named Janford Realtor, LLC. Despite its name, Janford Realtor, LLC had no involvement in real estate dealings. Instead, it acted as a mediator for several illegal and unlicensed exports of advanced, highly-controlled U.S.-origin Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) for AI and supercomputing applications to the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
Ho, a U.S. citizen, was the registered agent for the company, while Li, a Chinese national, served as its manager. The filing also names Bryan Curtis Raymond from Huntsville, Alabama, as the CEO and sole owner of “U.S. Company 1,” which received nearly $2 million from Janford Realtor. On his LinkedIn profile, Raymond describes himself as the CEO of Bitworks, an AI infrastructure company that “provides sales and support for Nvidia and AMD solutions.” He also noted being recently appointed as CTO of another AI cloud computing company, Corvex.
Ho and his co-conspirators acquired GPUs from vendors, including Raymond’s company, by using wire transfers from bank accounts in China. They allegedly employed fake shipping letters and contracts to circumvent export controls. Nvidia spokesperson John Rizzo commented to The Verge, stating, “The export system is rigorous and comprehensive. 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.”
