Chinese buyers are ordering Nvidia’s newest AI chips, defying US curbs

Traders in the country are selling computing systems with Nvidia’s Blackwell chips installed by routing them through third parties in nearby regions. Some sellers promise buyers delivery within six weeks.

The transactions are the latest example of how U.S. restrictions barring China from buying high-end AI processors have failed to stop the trade. Since 2022, Washington has imposed export controls to curb China’s access to semiconductors for training and powering state-of-the-art AI, but an underground network of brokers has sprung up to get around the controls.

What to do about the gray-market activity is a challenge for the Trump administration, which is weighing how to manage the technological rivalry with China.

Beijing is promoting AI development, and the recent frenzy surrounding Chinese AI developer DeepSeek has prompted local companies to deploy the technology more widely.

James Luo, a vendor in the Chinese tech hub of Shenzhen, said he received an order for more than a dozen Blackwell servers from a customer in Shanghai in January. The client deposited around $3 million into an escrow account for the order, according to transaction records and a contract seen by The Wall Street Journal, and Luo said he planned to ship the servers by mid-March.

Chinese resellers including Luo said they used entities registered outside of China to purchase Nvidia servers from companies in places such as Malaysia, Vietnam and Taiwan. These companies, which include data-center operators and authorized Nvidia customers, buy the servers for their own use and resell a portion to China, they said.

Nvidia said it would investigate every report of possible diversion and take appropriate action. It said customers for sophisticated AI equipment want services and support, “none of which anonymous traders claiming to possess Blackwell systems can provide."

Luo—the Shenzhen vendor—and other distributors said some resellers printed the unique serial numbers of the resold devices onto older equipment, and put forth the older machines for the inspections.

In its last days in office, the Biden administration imposed some of its strongest measures, introducing country caps on AI chip purchases globally. One goal was to prevent countries from acting as transshipment points for large numbers of chips destined for China. The measures are set to take effect later this year, but the Trump administration hasn’t made clear whether it will maintain them.

After the initial Biden controls took effect in late 2022, a cottage industry of middlemen sprang up, sometimes bringing small quantities of chips into China through human couriers. That business has now matured into a more sophisticated network that can handle the paperwork, foreign payments and logistics of moving bulky servers and rack modules with the latest chips across national borders.

Rather than being sold individually, chips are now more often sold as part of complete systems manufactured by device makers such as Dell Technologies and Super Micro Computer.

Dell and Super Micro said they complied with export controls and would act if wrongful behavior was discovered.

Even if Chinese entities acquire Nvidia’s latest chips, they might not get enough to build world-leading AI systems. U.S. AI executives have said they are adding hundreds of thousands of chips, far beyond what the Chinese sellers are offering. Still, the Chinese startup DeepSeek recently said it built competitive AI models using fewer chips.

Meanwhile, Chinese companies are also increasing orders for Nvidia’s H20, the most powerful chip among those that aren’t covered by American export controls, said people in the industry. Local cloud-computing giants such as Alibaba, Tencent and ByteDance are buying more H20s, partly in anticipation that the Trump administration could include the chip in export controls soon, they said.

Write to Raffaele Huang at raffaele.huang@wsj.com and Liza Lin at liza.lin@wsj.com