PLA-Linked Chinese University Bought Nvidia H200 Chips Despite US Blacklist

The purchase, recorded on the university's website on October 21, cost 874,700 yuan, or about $123,000, and was made for its management school through Shaanxi Bosuan Network Technology rather than from Nvidia directly. The H200 can only go to China with a US export licence, and licences for blacklisted institutions are normally refused.

The finding adds to pressure on Nvidia at a difficult moment. The company and its chief executive Jensen Huang face scrutiny in Washington over Huang's lobbying for looser limits on AI chip sales to China, after reports that he was targeted by a Chinese spying operation. Three Republican committee chairmen have asked Huang for a briefing on November 18 about his reported contacts with an alleged Chinese intelligence operative. The records also suggest the safeguards attached to Washington's limited reopening of H200 sales are not keeping the chips away from barred buyers.

The Xi'an university belongs to the group known as the "Seven Sons of National Defense" and does research on military aircraft, missiles and satellites. Washington blacklisted it in 2001 over alleged missile-proliferation activity and military research, and in 2019 tightened the restrictions so that licence applications for controlled US technology face a policy of denial in most cases.

The October purchase was not the university's only access to the chips. In January its cybersecurity school awarded two seven-month contracts, worth 441,700 yuan and 441,000 yuan, for access to servers each holding eight H200s, to be used for fine-tuning AI models and reinforcement-learning training. The university signed five contracts this year to rent computing capacity from Chinese companies, including H200s and other Nvidia processors, and also rented servers with eight A100s and eight A800s, chips that are banned from export to any Chinese entity.

Other Universities in the Records

Reuters said it reviewed 26 Chinese procurement and corporate records from this year. Among them, Shenzhen University bought three H100 chips for 769,800 yuan in September. Wuhan University of Technology bought a server containing an H100 for 355,000 yuan in June and four A100s in a separate 344,000-yuan purchase. Beihang University, another of the Seven Sons with aerospace and defence links, bought four A800s for 489,000 yuan in April. The University of Chinese Academy of Sciences issued notices in July and September for H800 and A800 computing services, one of which listed H800 access at 10 yuan per chip-hour.

In January the Trump administration began allowing some H200 exports to China on a case-by-case basis. That policy left Entity List restrictions in place, and its licensing rules require safeguards to stop blacklisted and military end users from reaching exported chips remotely. Reuters has previously reported that restricted Nvidia chips reach Chinese institutions inside servers from Super Micro, Dell and Gigabyte sold through domestic resellers, and that small quantities of H200s have entered China by indirect routes while Beijing withholds approval for large-scale imports.

Lawmakers in both parties have called for tighter controls, including chip-tracking requirements and more congressional oversight of exports, arguing that top Nvidia chips can speed Chinese work on weapons design, intelligence analysis and military modernisation. Huang has argued that continued US sales preserve American technological leadership and keep Chinese customers dependent on US technology.

Northwestern Polytechnical, Nvidia and the Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security did not respond to requests for comment, and neither did the other universities named in the records. Reuters said it could not find contact details for Shaanxi Bosuan Network Technology. Under Chinese law, public procurement agencies must check that a supplier can fulfil an order before naming it the winning bidder.