At least $1 billion worth of NVIDIA GPUs were smuggled to China, according to a report by The Financial Times (FT) on July 24. The development occurred after US President Donald Trump took office and tightened the country's export controls.
FT’s analysis of sales contracts, company filings, and insights from individuals familiar with the deals showed that the company’s B200 systems were the most in-demand and commonly accessible chip in China's 'black market’.
NVIDIA’s B200 is a GPU based on the company’s high-end Blackwell architecture. These chips are widely used across various hardware systems by AI companies such as OpenAI, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and others.
The direct sales of this chip are prohibited in China, as the US government has placed harsh restrictions on companies exporting advanced AI hardware.
The report revealed that a company in China claimed to have more than 100 business partners, including AliCloud, ByteDance’s Huoshan Cloud, and Baidu Cloud. Additionally, the report also revealed that most of the B200 racks sold by a Chinese company originated from Supermicro, a US-based company.
“Packaging and installation pictures and videos seen by the FT show product logos of companies such as Supermicro, Dell and Asus,” read the report. All of these companies are hardware infrastructure providers with NVIDIA chips embedded in their servers.
Besides, Hopper GPUs, a generation of chips preceding the Blackwell architecture, were sold in these markets.
Due to various administrative restrictions, NVIDIA was barred from selling its high-performance Hopper generation GPUs, such as the H100, H200, and H20 systems.
Recently, the company announced that the Trump administration has approved the sale of the H20 chip again.
Note that the company developed this version to comply with Biden-era regulations by modifying certain system specifications, which were previously deemed too powerful for export to China.
Read More: The Wild Ways China Smuggles NVIDIA Chips
These developments have taken place despite various measures implemented by government administrations to curb illegal exports to China through South Asian countries.
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