What changed
An investigation revealed that two Chinese companies approved to purchase Nvidia H200 chips have empty offices, with receptionists unfamiliar with the companies. The New York Times reported that these companies are linked to firms sanctioned by the U.S. for providing advanced technology to the Chinese military.
What this means in practice
The U.S. Department of Commerce has approved licenses for these companies, despite concerns about their ties to sanctioned entities. The companies include well-known firms like Baidu, BYD, Tesla Shanghai, ZTE, Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance, as well as two relatively unknown firms: New Matrix and Maginfra. The investigation found that New Matrix’s website lacked information about its owners, and public records show it was founded by Li Bin, who is connected to a sanctioned private equity firm. Maginfra is suspected of being linked to Inspur, which has been blacklisted by the U.S. for supporting the People’s Liberation Army.
Limitations and availability
The companies are not listed as final users of Nvidia’s H200 chips but are supposed to assemble them into AI servers. It remains unclear who their customers are. The New York Times also reported that Zhejiang Yindun Cloud Technology, another approved company, has executives linked to a data center operator that has sold compute capacity to Chinese military contractors. The U.S. banned the export of Nvidia AI GPUs in April 2025, but the ban was reversed in exchange for a 25% cut of the sale. Despite this, it took over eight months for the first H200 shipments to arrive in China.
