A 38-year-old Chinese national living in the East Bay was among four men arrested this week for allegedly exporting restricted Nvidia chips to China, federal prosecutors said Thursday.
San Leandro resident Cham Li, also known as Tony Li, was one of two Chinese nationals and two U.S. citizens taken into custody on federal criminal charges that they took part in a scheme to illegally export cutting-edge NVIDIA Graphics Processing Units with AI applications, to China, authorities said.
The other three are 34-year-old Hon Ning Ho, aka “Mathew Ho,” a U.S. citizen born in Hong Kong living in Tampa, Florida; 46-year-old Brian Curtis Raymond, a U.S. citizen living in Huntsville, Alabama; and 45-year-old Jing Chen, also known as Harry Chen, a Chinese national on F-1 nonimmigrant student visa from Tampa, Florida.
Prosecutors allege the four suspects received over $3.89 million in wire transfers from China to fund the enterprise.
Li was arrested Wednesday and was scheduled to appear Thursday in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
Ho and Chen were arrested Wednesday and appeared in court in the Middle District of Florida, while Raymond was arrested and appeared in the Northern District of Alabama.
“The indictment unsealed yesterday alleges a deliberate and deceptive effort to transship controlled NVIDIA GPUs to China by falsifying paperwork, creating fake contracts, and misleading U.S. authorities,” said John A. Eisenberg, assistant attorney general for national security.
Prosecutors said that from September 2023 to November 2025, Ho, Raymond, Li, and Chen allegedly conspired to violate the U.S. export controls by illegally exporting advanced GPUs to China through Malaysia and .
The suspects allegedly used Janford Realtor, LLC–a Tampa, Florida-based company owned and controlled by Ho and Li–as a front to purchase and then illegally export restricted chips to China, prosecutors said.
Raymond, though his Alabama-based electronics company, allegedly supplied NVIDIA chips to Ho and others for illegal Thailandexport to China, according to the indictment.
There were four separate exports of Nvidia chip to China, with the first and second shipments resulting in 400 NVIDIA A100 GPUs exported between October 2024 and January 2025, prosecutors said. The third and fourth exports to were disrupted by law enforcement and not completed.
None of the conspirators ever sought or obtained a license for any of these exports. “Instead, they lied about the intended destination of the GPUs to evade U.S. export controls,” the Department of Justice said in a news release.
China is seeking cutting-edge U.S. technology, including NVIDIA chips, according to the indictment, and is aiming to become the world leader in AI by 2030. The indictment maintains that China seeks to use AI for its military modernization efforts, and in connection with the design and testing of weapons of mass destruction and deployment of advanced AI surveillance tools.
Starting in October 2022, the U.S. Department of Commerce implemented new license requirements for the export of such technologies to China.
