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

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) said on Tuesday that two Chinese nationals have been arrested for their alleged involvement in illegally shipping "tens of millions of dollars" worth of high-performance AI chips to China.

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.