Two Americans and two Chinese nationals have been arrested and charged after being accused of exporting Nvidia AI chips to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), violating sensitive export controls and threatening national security.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that the two American citizens include 34-year-old Tampa, Florida resident Hon Ning “Mathew” Ho, who is now a U.S. citizen despite being born in Hong Kong, China, as well as 46-year-old Huntsville, Alabama resident Brian Curtis Raymond.
The two Chinese nationals arrested include Cham “Tony” Li, a resident of San Leandro, California, and Jing “Harry” Chen, who was living in Tampa, Florida, on an F-1 student visa.
“On Wednesday, November 19th, 2025, Ho and Chen were arrested and appeared in court in the Middle District of Florida, while Raymond was arrested and appeared in the North District of Alabama. Li was also arrested yesterday and is scheduled to appear today in the Northern District of California,” the DOJ wrote in a Thursday press release.
The highly advanced Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), which accommodate advanced artificial intelligence (AI) applications, have faced strict export controls as 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,” according to the DOJ release.
According to the indictment, Ho, Raymond, Li, and Chen conspired to violate the export controls from September 2023 to November 2025 “by illegally exporting advanced GPUS to the PRC through Malaysia and Thailand.”
The conspirators allegedly attempted to conceal their actions through Janford Realter, LLC, a front company based in Tampa, Florida, which was “never involved in any real estate transactions” — despite its name.
“Raymond, through his Alabama-based electronics company, supplied NVIDIA GPUs to Ho and others for illegal export to the PRC as part of the conspiracy,” the release detailed.
The conspiracy involved four separate export attempts. The first two exports resulted in 400 NVIDIA A100 GPUs being exported to the PRC between October 2024 and January this year.
“The third and fourth exports to the PRC were disrupted by law enforcement and therefore not completed. These attempted exports related to ten Hewlett Packard Enterprises supercomputers containing NVIDIA H100 GPUs and 50 separate NVIDIA H200 GPUs.”
The release goes on to note that despite knowing licenses were required to export the GPUs to the PRC, “none of the conspirators ever sought or obtained a license for any of these exports. Instead, they lied about the intended destination of the GPUs to evade U.S. export controls.”
Hellbound and Down 