US cleared Nvidia H200 chips for Chinese firms with empty offices and sanctioned ties, NYT finds

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The US Commerce Department approved roughly two dozen Chinese companies to buy or handle Nvidia's H200 artificial intelligence chips, including firms whose listed offices turned out to be empty and whose owners are tied to companies already under American sanctions, according to a New York Times investigation published on November 7. The clearest case is New Matrix, a Beijing firm created about 17 months ago and cleared to assemble H200 chips into AI servers. Reporters who visited its registered address found a vacant concrete shell, with wires dangling where lights should be, no listing in the building directory and no record of the company with the property managers.

Corporate records tie New Matrix's owners to Wise Road Capital, a private equity fund the United States placed on its Entity List in 2024 for acquiring sensitive chip assets for Beijing. One of its founders, Li Bin, chairs the state-backed Tsinghua Unigroup, whose subsidiary New H3C Semiconductor Technologies is itself on the Entity List for cooperating directly with the Chinese military. A second approved assembler, Maginfra, also had a deserted office when reporters visited, and analysts link it to Inspur, a server maker blacklisted in 2023 for supplying hardware to the People's Liberation Army, through shared staff and patents. Two more licensees drew scrutiny: Zhejiang Yindun Cloud Technology, which operates inside data centres owned by a cloud provider serving provincial defence bureaus, and Shanghai Jiatang, which emerged from state-owned Datang Telecom.

The approved list also includes recognisable buyers such as Baidu, BYD, Tesla Shanghai, Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance and ZTE Kangxun, each cleared for tens of thousands of chips, according to people familiar with the approvals. The licences follow a change of policy: H200 sales to China were restricted under the Biden administration, and the Trump administration eased the limits in December 2025 after lobbying by Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang, with chips assembled in Taiwan routed through the United States under a revenue-sharing arrangement with Washington. That is a different bottleneck from the roughly 600,000 H200 chips reported stockpiled in Hong Kong because Beijing has not approved their bulk import into mainland China.

The Times' reporters visited the offices themselves and checked the corporate records behind the ownership links, and the findings have been picked up by The Verge, Tom's Hardware and other outlets. What the reporting does not show is that any H200 chips actually reached New Matrix or Maginfra: both were approved to assemble or handle the chips for unspecified clients, not necessarily to use them, and no source has established a delivery. The Commerce Department has not publicly addressed the specific approvals, although its Bureau of Industry and Security has defended its licensing process, saying applications are carefully reviewed for national security risks. Accounts also differ on the size of Washington's cut of the sales, so that figure is not stated here. A Commerce filing reported alongside the investigation keeps the rule that extends Entity List limits to majority-owned subsidiaries paused until January 10, 2027.

The episode goes to the purpose of the export controls themselves, which are meant to keep America's most advanced AI hardware out of the hands of China's military. An approved handler with no visible operation and ownership links to blacklisted firms leaves outside observers with few independent ways to check where the chips end up. Liza Tobin, a former White House National Security Council director for China, told the Times she had 'a ton of concerns that neither the Commerce Department nor Nvidia is doing the due diligence needed to ensure the licensing terms are being followed.' House Republican committee chairs have asked Huang for a closed-door briefing on November 18, the day after Nvidia reports quarterly earnings.

None of this amounts to a finding of wrongdoing: an empty listed address is not proof of diversion, a corporate link to a blacklisted fund is not an agency finding that a licence was improper, and neither Commerce nor Nvidia has been accused of breaking the law. The open questions are the ones only Commerce can answer — who reviewed these applicants, what was checked, and whether any licence will now be revoked.