Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang has been keen to sell more chips to China, but Trump has said he won’t allow sales of its most powerful processors. Some appear to have found ways around the export controls. (Photo illustration by Cheng Xin/Getty Images)
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A U.S.-based businessman and Nvidia partner was illegally selling the chip giant’s most powerful AI processors and HP supercomputers to Chinese customers, according to a federal indictment filed earlier this month.
Huntsville, Alabama-based Brian Raymond, founder of AI infrastructure company Bitworks, is accused of allegedly working with three others to sell the chips to unspecified Chinese companies registered in Hong Kong. His co-defendants include two Chinese nationals and one U.S. citizen born in Hong Kong. In total, the men sold as many as 350 Nvidia chips and ten HP supercomputers for nearly $4 million, the DOJ claimed. The indictment was first reported by independent outlet Court Watch.
The Biden Administration enacted laws in 2022 to require that anyone selling chips for AI systems and supercomputers obtain a license from the Bureau of Industry and Security, making the export of Nvidia’s most powerful chips to China near impossible. According to the DOJ, the four men sold an array of Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs), including H100s, H200s and A100s, which have become massively popular in AI and supercomputing applications and are among those that are effectively banned from export to China. The DOJ said the alleged illegal sales began in 2023 and continued up to this month.
Forbes was unable to reach Raymond or any of the defendants’ lawyers at the time of publication. None has issued a plea and all remain innocent until proven guilty. According to court dockets, only one has been arrested. The Department of Justice declined to comment on the ongoing case. Bitworks did not respond to a request for comment.
Nvidia spokesperson John Rizzo said that using smuggled products was “a nonstarter, both technically and economically,” adding, “Data centers are massive and complex systems, making any smuggling extremely difficult and risky, and we do not provide any support or repairs for restricted products.”
Got a tip on breaches of export controls? Contact the reporter, Thomas Brewster, at [email protected] or +1 929-512-7964 on Signal.
Controlling sales of Nvidia chips to China has become a key policy in the U.S., as the government tries to prevent China from developing powerful AI models. In April, President Trump even halted exports of Nvidia H20 chips that had deliberately been designed to meet U.S. export limits. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who’s become close with Trump, has lobbied for fewer controls on his company’s chips, to some success: In August, Trump said he’d allow Nvidia to re-start exporting its less-powerful chips, in exchange for a 15% tax on its revenues.
Huang has argued that the export controls simply push Chinese companies to get more creative, while effectively closing off a huge market for his business, and had expressed hope there would be more developments coming out of Trump’s talks with Chinese president Xi Jinping. However, more recently, on 60 Minutes, Trump said that despite Huang’s push for more open business with China, he won’t allow sales of more powerful chips.
In the indictment, the DOJ wrote that Beijing was using AI for military modernization and weapons design, including “weapons of mass destruction,” as well as “advanced AI surveillance tools.”
Raymond’s LinkedIn page lists him as the CEO of Bitworks, an “Nvidia cloud partner” that sells servers and chips on behalf of the tech giant to end users and claims to work with AI startups, national labs and special effects companies. It also says he is the chief technology officer at AI cloud company Corvex. When reached for comment, Corvex said he had not yet joined the company and his job offer has been rescinded.
Hon Ning Ho, Cham Li and Jing Chen are accused of seeking out potential Chinese customers who wanted NVIDIA GPUs. They acquired the chips from Raymond, who allegedly worked with Ho to put fraudulent information on shipping documents to conceal information on the items and recipients. The DOJ says all four discussed schemes to evade export controls by going through third-party countries first. Ho, Li and Chen are also accused of working with unnamed individuals in Malaysia and Thailand to get the Nvidia tech into China. Per the indictment, payments from the Chinese companies, which were not named, went through either a front realtor company in Florida or direct to Raymond’s company account.
In August, two Chinese nationals were charged with a similar scheme, using Singapore and Malaysia as routes into Beijing, though they appeared to have generated as much as $30 million in revenue from illegal shipments, according to the Justice Department.
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