Over $1 billion worth of Nvidia’s top AI processors reached China in just 3 months after President Donald Trump tightened US chip export rules, according to The Financial Times.
The analysis finds that Nvidia’s B200 chip, which is banned for direct sale to China, has become a hot commodity on China’s black market. The findings highlight how hard it is for Washington to curb Beijing’s drive for advanced semiconductors.
This processor, used by major US firms such as OpenAI, Meta and Google to train AI systems, turned up in bulk sales from May onward. At that time, Chinese distributors began offering B200 units to data center suppliers serving local AI developers, just weeks after Trump blocked shipments of the less powerful H20 chip under Joe Biden’s export curbs.
Under Chinese law, companies can import and resell restricted chips once they pay the proper tariffs. But anyone exporting these parts from the US to China without approval is breaking American export controls.
Late last week, Nvidia’s chief executive, Jensen Huang, said the US would soon resume legal sales of the China‑specific H20 chip. In the months before that announcement, distributors in Guangdong, Anhui and Zhejiang provinces sold not only B200s but also other banned models like the H200 and H100. Taken together, contract values and insider estimates put the total at over $1 billion for that period.
Nvidia says there’s no evidence of AI chip diversion
Nvidia maintains it has “no evidence of any AI chip diversion” and says it neither knows of nor takes part in any unauthorized sales into China. The company said that establishing data centers using smuggled chips is a losing case, economically and technically.
Nvidia also noted that its service and support are available only to authorized products. Anhui-based “Gate of the Era” has emerged as one of the biggest B200 resellers, the Financial Times said.
Founded in February amid rumors that Trump would bar H20 exports to China, Gate of the Era is owned by another Shanghai‑registered group of the same name. The firm assembles chips into ready‑to‑use racks, each holding eight B200s plus the power, cooling units and software for plugging directly into data centers.
A rack, roughly sized to a suitcase and weighing about 150 kg with packaging, now sells for between Rmb 3 million and Rmb 3.5 million (about $489,000), down from over Rmb 4 million when they first appeared in China in mid‑May. Even at the lower price, that is nearly a 50% markup on comparable US rates.
One Chinese distributor received several hundred racks of chips
According to the insiders, Gate of the Era received two shipments, at the very least, consisting of several hundred racks each, since mid‑May. The company then sold them either directly or through smaller middlemen to data center operators and other buyers. In total, its B200 rack sales are thought to be close to $400 million.
Company records list China Century, also known as Huajiyuan, as Gate of the Era’s largest shareholder. That Shanghai‑based AI solutions provider claims on its website to run a Silicon Valley lab and a supply center in Singapore, using data to establish “the new century of a smart China.”
It says it has a large number of business partners, over 100, and names AliCloud, ByteDance’s Huoshan Cloud and Baidu Cloud as “trusted partners.” After being contacted by the Financial Times, Huoshan Cloud’s logo was removed from China Century’s site.
A China Century spokesperson told the FT it did “smart city work” but had not bought Nvidia chips and had no chip‑related business.
Industry insiders, along with product specs and packaging photos seen by Financial Times, point to Supermicro, an American assembler of chip systems, as the original source for the B200 racks that were sold in China.
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Source: https://www.cryptopolitan.com/china-billion-worth-of-nvidia-ai-chips/
