US citizens, Chinese nationals busted exporting "cutting-edge" Nvidia AI chips to China

Two American citizens and two Chinese nationals now face 50 years behind bars each for illegally exporting at least four shipments of Nvidia’s cutting-edge GPU chips and their AI technology to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the US Department of Justice (DoJ) said on Thursday.

The Nvidia AI-powered chips include: 400 NVIDIA A100 GPUs; ten Hewlett Packard Enterprises supercomputers containing additional NVIDIA H100 GPUs; and another 50 NVIDIA H200 GPUs.

According to the indictment, “the PRC seeks to become the world leader in AI by 2030 and aims to use AI for its military modernization efforts” and is actively scheming to obtain “cutting-edge US technology” to do so. This encompasses “the design and testing of weapons of mass destruction and the deployment of advanced AI surveillance tools,” it states.

Ho and Li are accused of setting up a fake real estate agency – Janford Realtor, LLC – to make the purchases and illegally export the GPUs, while Raymond is charged with selling the GPUs to Ho and Li via the Tampa-based real estate front using his own electronics store in Alabama.

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