Chinese companies allegedly smuggled in $1bn worth of Nvidia AI chips in the last three months, despite increasing export controls — some companies are already flaunting future B300 availability

Despite the U.S. desperately trying to block access to advanced AI chips from Nvidia and AMD, many Chinese companies still find a way to get them into their hands. According to a report from the Financial Times, at least a billion dollars’ worth of Nvidia B200s and other banned chips have been shipped to China ever since President Donald Trump banned the export of China-specific H20 GPUs (and the similarly performant AMD MI308) in April 2025.

The publication says that the data behind this claim comes from multiple sales contracts, company filings, and people who have been directly involved with the deals. While the U.S. has made it illegal for anyone to sell these banned chips to specific countries, China has no such restrictions, allowing anyone to trade them as long as the proper taxes have been paid.

Nvidia’s most powerful B200 model is said to be the most sought-after AI chip in the black market, with demand for it skyrocketing after Trump’s H20 ban. The market has quieted down since the company announced that the U.S. will soon start granting licenses for H20 chips, but some buyers cannot resist the performance delivered by the B200.

It’s also not difficult to find these chips, with some sellers likening availability to a seafood market. You’ll even find these chips openly advertised on Chinese social media apps, like Douyin and Xiaohongshu, with distributors and retailers offering everything from RTX 5090 GPUs to complete B200 servers. Demand is so good that some distributors are reportedly already advertising the upcoming B300, saying they’ll have them in stock when they arrive on the market, which is expected to be later this year.

Nvidia and its affiliates do not sell these banned products to Chinese customers. However, global trade and multiple layers can make it easy for these entities to get their hands on these chips. The company told FT that it does not provide service and support to these unauthorized AI chips, but the number of chips being sold in China indicates that the buyers and sellers find a way to support them.

Company CEO Jensen Huang has often downplayed the black market demand for Nvidia’s most powerful AI chips, even saying, “There’s no evidence of any AI chip diversion” when he was asked about it at Computex 2025. More than that, Huang says that export controls are a failure, with these bans and sanctions encouraging China to build its own hardware infrastructure that might eventually challenge American dominance. Even former U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo called moves like this a fool’s errand. After all, the massive demand and prices involved make smuggling Nvidia chips an extremely profitable operation.

For example, the Financial Times lists the going rate for one rack with eight B200 AI GPUs to be around CNY 3 to 3.5 million, or about US$420,000 to US$490,000 at the current exchange rate. This is about a 50% premium on prices in the U.S., meaning sellers can make more than $100,000 for each sale. One company, Gate of the Era, is estimated to have sold several hundred of these racks, with its gross sales almost reaching $400 million.

Still, the U.S. is not taking this lying down. Aside from putting more stringent export controls, it’s also pushing its allies to start cracking down on these smuggling operations. Singapore has clamped down on these activities, with the three people involved arrested by the authorities. It’s also considering blocking these sales of these chips to Malaysia and Thailand, which are also used as transshipment points by Chinese smugglers. But because of the huge profit one can make with Nvidia’s AI products, smugglers will always find a way to get these AI chips into the hands of their paying customers.

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