Nvidia China: US cleared H200 chip buyers whose offices were empty, NYT finds

The US government cleared roughly two dozen Chinese companies to receive Nvidia's H200 AI chips, and at least two of them could not be found at their own addresses. That is the finding of a New York Times investigation published on November 7, and it is the newest twist in the Nvidia China story: the chips are legal to sell, but nobody seems sure who is really buying them.

The short version:

Image: NVIDIA (HGX H200, nvidia.com)

What did the New York Times find?

The Times looked at the companies the Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) approved to handle H200s. Two stood out:

• New Matrix, a Beijing company about 17 months old, is licensed to assemble H200 chips into AI servers for other customers. Its registered address in a Beijing industrial park was, according to the Times, a hollow, unlit shell with wires hanging where the lights should be.
• Maginfra, another approved assembler, had a small locked room with a few empty chairs and desks when reporters visited in September, according to reports summarising the investigation.

The Times also reported that Chinese corporate filings link New Matrix's owners to companies tied to Wise Road Capital, a Beijing private equity fund that the US put on its Entity List (its trade blacklist) in December 2024. Analysts quoted in coverage link Maginfra to Inspur, a server maker that is also on that list.

Other approved buyers named in the reporting are household names: Baidu, BYD and Tesla's Shanghai operation.

How Nvidia's H200 got back into China

Graphic: NextDiff, from The Register, CNBC and The New York Times

The H200 is the generation before Nvidia's Blackwell chips, and it was blocked from China until late 2025. On December 8, 2025, President Trump posted that Nvidia could ship H200s to "approved customers" in China, with 25% of the money going to the US. Blackwell and the newer Rubin chips stayed off limits.

Rules followed in January 2026. CNBC reported that buyers have to show security procedures and no military use, Nvidia has to certify there is enough supply for US customers, and each approved customer can buy up to 75,000 chips. The 25% is collected as a tariff, because the chips pass through the US on their way from Taiwan to China. By May 14, around 10 Chinese firms were cleared, including Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance and JD.com, with Lenovo and Foxconn as distributors. The Times now counts about two dozen.

How does an export licence like this work?

In plain terms, a licence is a permission slip from BIS for a named company to receive a controlled product. The check relies largely on paperwork: who owns the buyer, what it says it will do with the chips, and promises about end use.

An assembler like New Matrix matters because it sits in the middle. It takes the GPUs, builds them into servers and passes those servers on. If the assembler is a shell, the chips can end up with whoever is behind it, and the licence holder on paper tells you little about the real end user. That is the gap critics point to. Liza Tobin, a former China director at the White House National Security Council, told the Times she doubts that either Commerce or Nvidia is doing the checking the terms require.

Image: Tony Webster, the Herbert C. Hoover Building in Washington (CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

What Nvidia and the US government say

A BIS spokesperson said every application is carefully reviewed for national security risks. Commerce has not explained what checks it ran on New Matrix specifically. Nvidia spokesman John Rizzo said, as reported by ShiftDelete citing the Times, that it makes no sense for China's military to depend on American technology, and that Beijing has itself strictly limited H200 imports. New Matrix did not answer the Times.

Two caveats matter. First, an empty office is not proof of wrongdoing: a newly registered firm can use a nominal address while it sets up elsewhere. Second, no report shows H200s were shipped to New Matrix or Maginfra. A licence is permission, not a delivery. Reports covering the investigation put H200 shipments to China at under 1% of Nvidia's data-centre revenue in the quarter that ended in July.

Why it matters

The H200 deal was sold as a controlled opening: real revenue for Nvidia and a 25% cut for the US, with the most advanced chips kept at home. That bargain only works if the US knows where the chips go. If licences can go to firms with no visible operations, Congress is likely to push for tighter checks, and that uncertainty lands on Nvidia's China plans. Chip stocks react fast to that kind of news: Intel's record share-price crash last month showed how quickly.

What's next

Expect questions from the House Select Committee on the CCP, which has pressed Commerce on Nvidia's China chips before, and possible reviews of the New Matrix and Maginfra licences. For Nvidia, the bigger question is whether Washington tightens the rules for everyone, including the big-name buyers that do have offices.