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.
The chips are highly restricted from exports because of their use in artificial intelligence and supercomputing applications, according to the indictment unsealed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Tampa, Florida.
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That company is not implicated in the case, and told CNBC that his job offer has been rescinded.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.
The indictment was first reported by CourtWatch, the court document aggregation news site founded by counterrorism researcher Seamus Hughes.
The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Middle District of Florida, which is prosecuting the case, said that 400 Nvidia A100 chips were exported to China as part of the scheme from October 2024 and January in two separate shipments.
"The third and fourth exports to [China] were disrupted by law enforcement and therefore not completed," the office said. "These attempted exports related to ten Hewlett Packard Enterprises supercomputers containing NVIDIA H100 GPUs and 50 separate NVIDIA H200 GPUs."
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."
... continue reading