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The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced in a statement that it has arrested two U.S. citizens and two Chinese nationals and charged them with conspiracy to illegally export to China advanced NVIDIA microchips called Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). GPUs are used in a wide range of critical artificial intelligence (AI) applications.
The two American citizens who were arrested are Hon Ning Ho, also known as “Mathew Ho,” a Tampa resident who was born in Hong Kong, and Brian Curtis Raymond from Huntsville, Alabama. The two Chinese nationals arrested by the DOJ are Cham Li, also known as “Tony Li,” a resident of San Leandro, California, and Jing Chen, also known as “Harry Chen,” a 45-year-old who was living in Tampa under an F-1 nonimmigrant student visa.
All four were arrested and appeared in courtrooms in their respective jurisdictions on Nov. 19.
“The indictment unsealed yesterday alleges a deliberate and deceptive effort to transship controlled NVIDIA GPUs to China by falsifying paperwork, creating fake contracts, and misleading U.S. authorities,” said Assistant Attorney General for National Security John A. Eisenberg. “The National Security Division is committed to disrupting these kinds of black markets of sensitive U.S. technologies and holding accountable those who participate in this illicit trade.”
Mentioned in the indictment is the fact that AI is the new battleground between the U.S. and the People’s Republic of China (PRC). In announcing the indictment, the DOJ stated that “the PRC seeks to become the world leader in AI by 2030 and seeks to use AI for its military modernization efforts and in connection with the design and testing of weapons of mass destruction and deployment of advanced AI surveillance tools.”
In line with this, China wants to tap the power of certain U.S. technology, such as NVIDIA GPUs, to gain a military edge against the U.S.
The type of microchips being exported to China fall under specific license requirements that were put in place in October 2022 to protect U.S. national security.
The indictment alleges that from Sept. 2023 to Nov. 2025, the four defendants conspired to violate the license requirements by illegally exporting advanced GPUs to China through a circuitous route. The chips would be shipped from the U.S., first through Malaysia, then through Thailand, and ultimately to mainland China.
According to the DOJ, Ho and Li owned and controlled a Tampa firm called Janford Realtor, LLC, and used the company to carry out the export scheme. Janford would allegedly buy and then illegally export the chips to China. The DOJ said that Janford Realtor was never involved in any real estate transactions.
Raymond, who operated an Alabama-based electronics company, allegedly supplied the microchips to the others for resale into China.
This wasn’t a one-time thing. The DOJ alleges there were four separate exports of chips to China. In the first two exports, 400 NVIDIA A100 GPUs were shipped to China between October 2024 and January 2025. The DOJ said that the third and fourth exports were disrupted by law enforcement and were never completed. In those cases, the defendants were allegedly trying to ship 10 Hewlett Packard Enterprises supercomputers containing NVIDIA H100 GPUs, and 50 separate NVIDIA H200 GPUs.
None of the defendants made any effort to obtain a license for any of these exports. In fact, the DOJ claims the defendants lied about the intended destination of the GPUs. In return, the DOJ states that the four received a total of more than $3.89 million in wire transfers from the PRC.
The charges the defendants face include multiple counts of conspiracy to violate the Export Control Reform Act (ECRA); ECRA violations; smuggling; conspiracy to commit money laundering, and money laundering. Each defendant faces a possible 20-year prison sentence for each ECRA violation, 10 years per smuggling count, and 20 years per money laundering count. Given the number of counts they face, it’s possible they could spend the rest of their lives in prison.
The defendants will be tried in federal court in Florida.
Earlier this year, a report from the Financial Times revealed that at least $1 billion worth of Nvidia’s chips were shipped to China after the Trump administration began to intensify the restrictions on microchips to China.
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