US cleared two obscure Chinese firms to buy Nvidia H200 chips
Technology
Sunday, November 8, 2026
- Updated Nov 8, 2026 09:13
The US Commerce Department approved Nvidia H200 export licences for two Chinese firms, New Matrix and Maginfra, whose listed addresses led investigators to empty offices, and whose owners and personnel connect them to US-sanctioned, military-linked Chinese technology groups.
Why it matters: The licences are part of the first wave of H200 approvals, around two dozen firms in all, and the findings raise the question of whether Commerce vetted the intermediaries standing between Nvidia's most capable exportable chip and its final users in China.
Data as of November 8, 2026, 09:13 Toronto: Tom's Hardware report of November 8, 2026, read in full via the estate browser route, reporting a New York Times investigation; the Times original was not read directly in this run, so every finding below rests on that one chain of reporting and is graded C. The two firms are reported as server assemblers, not final users, and the identity of their customers is not established in the reporting. Developing item.
The US Department of Commerce approved export licences for two Chinese companies, New Matrix and Maginfra, to buy Nvidia H200 chips and assemble them into AI servers for unnamed final users, but a New York Times investigation found that addresses listed for both companies led to empty offices whose receptionists and neighbours did not know them. New Matrix was founded by Li Bin, who chairs the partly state-owned Tsinghua Unigroup and owns New H3C Semiconductor Technologies, which Commerce has placed on its Entity List for cooperating with the Chinese military, while Maginfra is suspected of links to Inspur, blacklisted since 2023 for supporting the People’s Liberation Army, through shared personnel, patents and a similar government ownership structure.
Around two dozen firms have received H200 approvals in all, among them Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, BYD and ZTE, and a third recipient, Zhejiang Yindun Cloud Technology, has executives related to the founder of Range Intelligent Computing Technology Group, a data centre operator that has sold compute capacity to Chinese military contractors.
Sources
- Two Chinese companies cleared to buy banned Nvidia AI chips have empty offices and unknown addresses - Tom's Hardware, reporting a New York Times investigation - 2026-11-08