Two Chinese nationals were arrested in California and charged with illegally shipping tens of millions of dollars' worth of AI chips to China, including Nvidia H100s, the U.S. Justice Department said Tuesday.

Nvidia rejected Chinese accusations that its data center GPUs for AI include a hardware function that could remotely deactivate the chips, which is commonly called a "kill switch." "NVIDIA GPUs do not and should not have kill switches and backdoors," wrote Nvidia's chief security officer.

The pair allegedly shipped advanced graphic processing units to China from October 2022 to July 2025 through their El Monte-based company, ALX Solutions.