Financial Times has recently published Investigation of chip exports In the early three -month phase in Trump’s administration, when export control was tightened to prevent the sale of high -power AI equipment to China. According to FT, at this period during this period at least $ 1 billion GPU NVIDIA was sent.
FT claims that he analyzed “dozens of sales contracts, company reports and many people with direct knowledge of contracts” to come to the conclusion that the B200 AI GPU Nvidia was the most commonly available product in what describes as the “raging” Chinese black market, without the apparent knowledge of Nvidia.
The investigation states that within three months before recently relieving the restrictions on the export of Chip Nvidia, Chinese distributors from the provinces of Gungdong, Zhejiang and Anhui allegedly sold many models of NVIDIA AI systems, including B200, H100 and H200, in potentially weight.
The chips were allegedly sold in the “large suitcase” stands and packed with components and software needed to attach them directly to the existing data center. It is said that about USD 489,000 was valued for a stand, which, as FT notes, would be a bonus of about 50%, based on the average price of similar products in the US.
The investigation also claims that some Chinese sellers openly sold stands on social media, and some suppliers offered testing illegal systems to prove that this was the “plug-and-play” procedure to connect them to the existing infrastructure of data centers. One distributor apparently described the richness of suppliers as “like a seafood market … there is no shortage of”.
It should be noted that although (and still there is) the legal receipt of confined NVIDIA systems in China, entities selling and sending them will be disgusting at that time. FT indicates that “there is no suggestions” that companies such as Supermicro, Dell and Asus (whose product logo is apparent in the pictures of packaging and installations of stands obtained by FT), were aware of ads in social media or their products sold in China.
Similarly, NVIDIA said FT that “there is no evidence of any redirect of AI chips”, and the Financial Times confirms that she did not find evidence that the company is involved or has knowledge of the sale of confined products.
In May this year, AI Anthropic warned against “sophisticated smuggling operations” by GPU AI to China, “covering hundreds of millions of dollars tokens”, the claim that Nvidia has rejected. The company’s spokesman told NBC that Anthropic tells “high stories”, especially in relation to the claims that “large, heavy and sensitive electronics is somehow smuggled in” baby bumps “or” with live lobbies. “
Despite this, according to FT, highly valued equipment worth $ 1 billion looks like he could do it in the hands of Chinese suppliers. Nvidia recently submitted applications for the sale of the H20 GPU in China, certainly the US government, that the licenses will be awarded and the warm dialogue between President Trump and the General Director of NVIDIA Jensen Huang in recent days seems to confirm the relations between them.
The first point of the AI Trump action plan refers to new export packages to “America friends and allies around the world”, so while sanctions could be overthrown in the past by unknown entities – and who counts because America’s friend is variable on a given day – it looks like official trade routes can slow down again, hoping for some black markets.

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