By Dan Mangan
Publication Date: 2025-11-20 21:22:00
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.
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That company is not implicated in the case, and told CNBC that his job offer has been rescinded.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.
Chips sent to China as part of the alleged scheme, which began in September 2023, included Nvidia’s A100 and H200 graphics processing units and Hewlett Packard Enterprise products, according to the indictment filed on Nov. 13 in U.S. District Court in Tampa, Florida.
The chips are highly restricted from exports because of their use in artificial intelligence and supercomputing applications, the indictment notes.
The indictment was first…
