The CEO of an AI infrastructure company in Alabama is accused of selling Nvidia GPUs for illegal export.
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Federal prosecutors have charged four people with illegally smuggling Nvidia GPUs and HP supercomputers with Nvidia GPUs from the United States to China, according to a court document. The U.S. government has imposed restrictions that prevent Nvidia from selling its most powerful AI training chips to China, but Chinese companies like DeepSeek have built competing AI models. After DeepSeek released its R1 model earlier this year, Scale CEO Alexander Wangexpressed concerns that China has more Nvidia H100 AI chips than widely believed, despite export controls.
According to the documents, only one person has been arrested so far, while the four face charges including trafficking, conspiracy and money laundering. The individuals charged — Mathew Ho, Brian Curtis Raymond, Tony Li and Harry Chen — are alleged to have conspired to export the GPUs since late 2023, including shipping 50 Nvidia H200 GPUs and several batches of the older H100 GPUs without a license.
The document explains that part of the scheme involved a supposed front company called Janford Realtor, LLC. Despite its name, Janford Realtor, LLC never engaged in any real estate transactions. Instead, the company served as an intermediary for numerous illegal and unlicensed exports to the People’s Republic of China of advanced and highly controlled US-origin Graphics Processing Units with artificial intelligence and supercomputer applications.
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Ho, a U.S. citizen, was the company's registered agent, and Li, a Chinese national, was identified as the company's director.
Bryan Curtis Raymond of Huntsville, Alabama, is listed in the document as the CEO and sole owner of “US Company 1,” which was paid nearly $2 million by Janford Realtor. On his LinkedIn, Raymond describes himself as the CEO of Bitworks, an AI infrastructure company that provides sales and support for Nvidia and AMD solutions.
He also said he was recently hired as CTO for another AI cloud computing company, Corvex. Ho and the other conspirators purchased GPUs from suppliers, including Raymond and his company, using funds sent via wire transfer from accounts in China, while using false shipping documents and contracts to circumvent export controls.
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“The export system is strict and comprehensive,” said Nvidia spokesman John Rizzo. “Even small sales of older-generation products are subject to strict regulations.”
