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A Texas man has been accused of trying to smuggle at least $160 million in Nvidia AI GPUs to China, violating US export laws.
The Justice Department announced the case as part of a crackdown on GPU smuggling amid national security concerns about the hardware being secretly exported to China and bolstering the country’s AI ambitions.
The suspect, 43-year-old Alan Hao Hsu of Missouri City, Texas, “knowingly exported and attempted to export” numerous shipments of Nvidia’s H100 and H200 GPUs to China, according to federal investigators. He and his company, Hao Global, an IT repair provider, allegedly falsified shipping documents to conceal the GPUs' true destination.
In return, he received over $50 million in wire transfers from buyers in China. Hsu, who was charged in May, has since pleaded guilty to the smuggling; prosecutors unsealed the case on Monday. He now faces up to 10 years in prison.
In announcing the case, US Attorney Nicholas Ganjei for the Southern District of Texas said, “The country that controls these chips will control AI technology; the country that controls AI technology will control the future.”
The smuggling underscores the value of Nvidia’s GPUs, as both China and the US have been racing to develop next-generation AI systems. In addition to Hsu, federal investigators also arrested and charged a Canadian citizen, 58-year-old Benlin Yuan, and a Chinese national, 43-year-old Fanyue Gong, in similar schemes to illegally export Nvidia GPUs to China. Earlier this year, the Justice Department also busted two other smuggling operations.
In a bit of irony, President Trump on Monday signed off on Nvidia selling the H200 GPU to China, provided the company forks over 25% of the sales to the US government. However, the H200 is based on Nvidia’s older Hopper architecture, which was announced in 2022 and introduced a year later.
"This policy will support American Jobs, strengthen US Manufacturing, and benefit American taxpayers," Trump said in announcing the deal. Nvidia’s most cutting-edge GPUs, including those built on the Blackwell and Rubin architectures, remain barred from export to China.