Federal prosecutors have charged four people with illegally smuggling Nvidia GPUs and HP supercomputers with Nvidia GPUs from the US to China, according to a court filing spotted by Court Watch. The US government has placed restrictions that prevent Nvidia from selling its most powerful chips for AI training to China, but Chinese companies like DeepSeek have still created competitive AI models. After DeepSeek released its R1 model earlier this year, Scale CEO Alexander Wang said he thinks China has far more of Nvidia’s H100 AI chips than people may think, despite the export controls, and operations like this may help explain how.

Nvidia, which reported quarterly earnings of a record $57 billion in revenue on Wednesday.

According to the documents, only one person has been arrested so far,

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