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Bloomberg reports analysis of documents submitted to Chinese authorities… including servers equipped with high-performance B300 chips
It has been confirmed that financial companies owned by Chinese local governments have funded the purchase of high-performance artificial intelligence (AI) chips from Nvidia, which are subject to U.S. government export controls.
On the 2nd, Bloomberg News reported, after analyzing documents submitted to Chinese authorities, that the Chinese state-owned sector had financed Nvidia chip transactions that appear to circumvent U.S. export controls.
According to the documents, Semi-Tech Leasing Group provided funding over the past year to a company called Gloryview Technology (Hongjing Keji) to purchase more than 700 servers.
One contract also explicitly detailed funding for 32 AsusTek (Huashuo) servers equipped with Nvidia B300 chips purchased from a Chinese company.
Bloomberg pointed out that documents containing these details show a pathway for high-performance AI chips to flow into China, which the Donald Trump U.S. administration tried to block using various restrictive measures.
The B300 is an AI chip belonging to Nvidia's high-performance Blackwell product family, and it cannot be sold to China without permission from the U.S. government, which is wary of China's AI development.
Despite these export control measures, evidence has emerged that high-performance AI chips are flowing into China with the support of Chinese state-owned capital.
The U.S. government has claimed that black market brokers smuggled billions of dollars worth of Nvidia products, including Blackwell chips, into China.
The order for 32 servers, model 'XA NB3I-E12', is not large in scale by itself.
However, Bloomberg noted that hundreds of other servers also match the specifications capable of accommodating Nvidia Blackwell chips, and that Chinese state-owned capital funded the purchase process. The documents did not specify which chips were actually installed in these servers.
Semi-Tech Leasing is a company established in 2015 by the National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, also known as the 'Big Fund', to support China's semiconductor industry.
After the Big Fund sold most of its shares in 2020, local governments in several regions, including Shenzhen and Beijing, jointly hold most of the company's shares.
Semi-Tech Leasing has recently expanded its business into data center infrastructure. According to the company, it has invested over 11 billion yuan (approximately 2.2 trillion won) to date in building an industrial ecosystem encompassing AI model training and semiconductors.
According to data confirmed by Bloomberg, Gloryview and its subsidiaries borrowed over 3 billion yuan (approximately 600 billion won) from Semi-Tech Leasing to purchase more than 700 servers from August last year to May this year.
Most of these servers, including 32 Blackwell systems, were found to be installed in the China Mobile data center complex in Zhongwei, Ningxia, China, where the Gobi Desert is located.
Zhongwei is one of China's national-level computing clusters designated by the Chinese government and a major hub for China's AI data centers.
China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, Semi-Tech Leasing, Gloryview, and China Mobile did not respond to Bloomberg's request for comment.
Nvidia stated, "We are verifying this report and will cooperate with our OEM customers to investigate."
AsusTek also stated in a statement, "We are committed to strictly complying with all applicable laws and regulations, including export controls."
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