Four Americans charged with smuggling Nvidia GPUs and HPE supercomputers to China face up to 200 years in prison —$3.89 million worth of gear smuggled in operation

He US Department of Justice On Thursday, he accused a group of four people led by an Alabama businessman of illegally shipping high-performance Nvidia GPUs and restricted HP supercomputers to China. The alleged transactions, which included purchasing restricted hardware from official channels and then smuggling it into China through various schemes, spanned several years and amounted to approximately $3.89 million in total value. The defendants now face up to 200 years in prison.

The operation was led by Brian Curtis Raymond, founder of Bitworks, a Huntsville, Alabama-based distributor of artificial intelligence hardware that sells products from AMD, Nvidia, PNY and Sapphire, among others. Bitworks legally acquired restricted hardware, including Nvidia A100, H100 and H200 accelerators for AI and HPC workloads and 10 HPE supercomputers, and then sold it to Janford Realtor, based in Tampa, Florida, which was controlled by Hon Ning ‘Mathew’ Ho, a Hong Kong-born US citizen.