A Chinese university with deep ties to the People's Liberation Army bought Nvidia's powerful H200 artificial intelligence chips last month despite being on a United States export blacklist, procurement records show, highlighting gaps in Washington's efforts to curb China's access to advanced technology. The purchases were first reported by Reuters on Wednesday, after a review of Chinese procurement and corporate records.
Northwestern Polytechnical University, a member of China's "Seven Sons of National Defense" group of elite defence-focused universities, bought two H200 chips last month for 874,700 yuan, about $123,000, according to an October 21 procurement record published on the university's own website. The chips were purchased for its management school from Shaanxi Bosuan Network Technology rather than directly from Nvidia, the record shows.
The H200 is among Nvidia's most capable chips for training and running advanced AI systems, and it is subject to US export licence approvals that are normally denied for blacklisted institutions such as Northwestern Polytechnical. The university, based in the northwestern city of Xian, conducts research related to military aircraft, missiles and satellites, and the US Commerce Department added it to its trade blacklist, known as the Entity List, in 2001 over its alleged involvement in missile-proliferation activities and military research.
The restrictions were tightened in 2019, making licences for exports of controlled US technology to the university subject to a policy of denial in most circumstances. The purchase therefore raises immediate questions about how a blacklisted institution obtained hardware that Washington had specifically sought to keep out of its hands, and whether the chips reached the university through a domestic intermediary that was itself able to buy them.
The outright purchase was not the university's only route to the chips. Procurement records show that Northwestern Polytechnical also bought access this year to H200 chips and other powerful Nvidia AI processors through five contracts for rented computing capacity from Chinese companies. In addition, its cybersecurity school awarded two seven-month contracts in January for access to servers containing eight H200 chips each, worth 441,700 yuan and 441,000 yuan, covering the fine-tuning of AI models and reinforcement-learning training.
A Reuters review of 26 Chinese procurement and corporate records from this year found universities and research institutions buying US-restricted Nvidia chips or renting access to Nvidia-powered computing services that use such chips through domestic suppliers. The pattern suggests that the controls are being circumvented not through a single smuggling route but through a domestic market in which restricted hardware and computing power change hands behind layers of intermediaries.
The findings land in the middle of a shifting policy landscape. President Donald Trump's administration began allowing some H200 exports to China on a case-by-case basis in January, but that policy did not lift the separate restrictions applying to Entity List organisations such as Northwestern Polytechnical. The January licensing rules also require safeguards to prevent blacklisted entities and military end-users from remotely accessing chips exported under the policy, which covers H200 processors and less advanced models.
The episode also adds to the scrutiny facing Nvidia and its chief executive, Jensen Huang, in Washington. Three Republican congressional committee chairmen have requested a briefing with Huang on 18 November over his reported contacts with an alleged Chinese intelligence operative, and a shareholder lawsuit filed on 9 November accuses the company of failing to disclose the alleged affair. Last week, Reuters reported that small quantities of H200 chips had reached China through indirect routes while Beijing withheld approval for large-scale imports, and about 600,000 of the chips are said to be stockpiled in Hong Kong awaiting that approval.
Northwestern Polytechnical, Nvidia and the US Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security, which oversees export controls, did not respond to requests for comment. The A100 and A800 chips are banned from export to all Chinese entities, though the H200 is the most advanced of those cited in the university's procurement records, and the question now is whether Washington will tighten the rules further or accept that its controls are leaking.
For the US-China technology rivalry, the purchase is a small transaction with a large meaning: two chips, bought openly enough to appear in a public procurement record, by an institution the United States blacklisted a quarter of a century ago. It suggests that export controls, however carefully written, are only as strong as the enforcement behind them — and that enforcement is now the question Congress will be asking.
