(Reuters) -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.

Two Chinese nationals were arrested this week on charges that they sent tens of millions of dollars worth of advanced AI chips made by Nvidia Corp. to China in violation of US export restrictions, according to authorities.

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.

A pair of Chinese nationals were charged by the U.S. Department of Justice for allegedly shipping tens of millions of dollars worth of Nvidia's (NVDA) H100 GPUs back to China without a proper license through a company based in El Monte,

Justice Department charges two Chinese nationals, including illegal alien, with violating export laws by shipping sensitive AI microchips to China.

Two Southern California residents have been arrested and face federal criminal charges for allegedly illegally sending “tens of millions of dollars’ worth of sensitive microchips used in artificial intelligence (AI) applications” to China.