The US Commerce Department approved roughly two dozen Chinese companies to buy or handle Nvidia's H200 AI chips, but a New York Times investigation found that two of them operate from vacant offices and trace to firms sanctioned for supplying the Chinese military. Reporters who visited the registered Beijing address of an approved company called New Matrix found a bare concrete shell with wires hanging from the ceiling, no directory listing, and building managers who had no record of the firm. A second approved licensee, Maginfra, was registered to a deserted room holding a few chairs and empty desks.
Neither company was cleared as a final user of the chips. Both were authorized only to assemble H200 accelerators into AI servers for unnamed clients, the step at which custody of the hardware becomes hardest to trace. Public records tie New Matrix to Wise Road, a private-equity fund the US blacklisted in 2024 for acquiring sensitive chip assets for Beijing; its key founder, Li Bin, chairs the state-backed Tsinghua Unigroup, whose subsidiary New H3C Semiconductor sits on the Commerce Department's Entity List. Maginfra is suspected of operating as a front for Inspur, a server maker Washington blacklisted in 2023 for supplying the People's Liberation Army.
The approvals flow from a policy shift Nvidia itself lobbied for. Late last year the Trump administration relaxed export restrictions on the H200 after pressure from chief executive Jensen Huang, creating an arrangement in which chips assembled in Taiwan are routed through the United States so Washington can collect a 25 percent tariff. The result is a licensing system that critics say is being rubber-stamped. "I have a ton of concerns that neither the Commerce Department nor Nvidia is doing the due diligence needed to ensure that the licensing terms are being followed," said Liza Tobin, a former China director at the White House National Security Council.
The findings land alongside separate signs that advanced chips keep reaching China through intermediaries. Nvidia has quietly told foreign cloud providers they must generate at least 51 percent of their revenue from customers outside China to keep buying its hardware, a condition the Financial Times reported was delivered verbally over the summer and aimed at companies that rent Chinese firms access to processors they cannot import directly. The same week, the FT reported that US intelligence believes Huang was romantically involved with a suspected Chinese agent, Alice Huang, an executive at the Singaporean firm Megaspeed, which has been accused of smuggling about $2 billion in AI chips into China through a subsidiary. Nvidia denies the espionage claim and says Megaspeed has no ties to China.
Nvidia defends the broader arrangement as sound industrial policy, arguing that "data centres and clouds built on American chips are the foundation that American model and application makers need to compete worldwide." The investigation cuts against that framing: if licences are granted to companies that cannot be located and that trace to sanctioned military suppliers, the controls meant to keep the most capable American accelerators out of Chinese defense programs are, in at least these cases, controlling nothing. It remains unverified who the final buyers of the servers assembled by New Matrix and Maginfra are, which is precisely the question the approval system was supposed to answer before the chips shipped.