Technology

The Southern District of Texas announced the seizure of more than $50 million in NVIDIA GPUs bound for China in violation of US export laws. Authorities arrested two businessmen, one of them the owner of a Houston company, accused of smuggling the chips used to train and run AI models.

It’s the end of another year, so it’s time for the Engadget staff to compile a list of the year’s biggest losers. We scour over articles from the previous 12 months to determine the people, companies, products and trends that made our lives worse over the course of the year. Some selections may be so pervasive they actually make our list of biggest winners.

NVIDIA is now allowed to sell its second-best H200 processors to China, rather than just the sanction-approved H20 model that China had previously declined to buy, President Trump wrote on Truth Social.

When the nonprofit Freedom House recently published its annual report, it noted that 2025 marked the 15th straight year of decline for global internet freedom. The biggest decline, after Georgia and Germany, came within the United States.