The U.S. Department of Justice on Thursday accused a group of four individuals led by an Alabama entrepreneur of illegally shipping restricted high-performance Nvidia GPUs and HP supercomputers to China. The alleged transactions — which included buying restricted hardware from official channels and then smuggling it to China using various schemes — spanned several years and reached roughly $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 AI hardware distributor 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 Tampa, Florida-based Janford Realtor, which was controlled by Hon Ning 'Mathew' Ho, a U.S. citizen born in Hong Kong.
