Tech company CTO and others indicted for exporting Nvidia chips to China (arstechnica.com)

Federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment charging four people — two U.S. citizens and two Chinese nationals living in the U.S. — with conspiring to illegally export Nvidia GPUs to China by falsifying paperwork, fabricating contracts, and misleading U.S. authorities. The defendants, who include Brian Curtis Raymond (briefly listed as CTO of AI cloud startup Corvex) and three others, are accused of receiving nearly $3.9 million from Chinese companies. They face charges under the Export Control Reform Act of 2018, plus smuggling and money-laundering counts, and could face decades in prison and forfeiture if convicted. The case underscores intensified U.S. enforcement of semiconductor export controls and is consequential for the AI/ML community because Nvidia GPUs are central to model training and inference. Beyond criminal exposure for bad actors, the indictment signals greater regulatory scrutiny on cross-border hardware transactions, tighter compliance burdens for startups, cloud providers, and investors, and heightened due diligence around leadership and supply chains. It also highlights how attempts to bypass export limits could attract severe penalties as the U.S. seeks to restrict high-performance computing transfers for national-security reasons.