In March 2024, Matthew Kelly, a 49-year-old marketing executive from New York, allegedly texted his business partner Stanley Yi Zheng what looked to be a draft pitch to drum up new clients.
In the message, sent on Chinese messaging app WeChat, Kelly allegedly wrote he was looking for partners willing to help move Nvidia GPUs to buyers in China, which the U.S. government had banned from receiving the cutting-edge chips. Kelly wrote business was “lucrative” right now, with millions in profits to be made per order. He wanted people who could either find buyers who needed Nvidia chips for “AI, cloud, bit mining etc.” or who could find customers in China to act as a fake front company, according to court records.
