An investigation by The New York Times has raised serious doubts about how carefully the U.S. government is screening Chinese companies allowed to buy Nvidia’s H200 AI chips. The addresses of two approved firms, New Matrix and Maginfra, led to empty offices with some leftover furniture, and receptionists at the buildings didn’t know either company. People working nearby told investigators they had never heard of either company or seen anyone using the space.
How the H200 export license program works
Nvidia’s H200 chips were caught up in a back-and-forth over U.S. export policy. President Trump banned sales of Nvidia AI GPUs to China in April 2025, including versions tuned to stay under Washington’s performance limits, then reversed course later in the year in exchange for a 25% cut of the sale price. Even after that reversal, it took more than eight months for the first H200 shipments to actually reach China, partly because Beijing initially refused to let domestic companies apply for them. Once China lifted its own restrictions, roughly two dozen firms reportedly received U.S. approval to buy the chips, according to The New York Times.
Familiar names next to unknown ones
Most of the approved buyers are companies most tech readers would recognize: Baidu, BYD, Tesla Shanghai, Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, and even ZTE, which has previously been blacklisted from the U.S. market entirely. But the investigation also flagged two names nobody outside the industry seems to know: New Matrix and Maginfra. Neither company is listed as the end user of the chips. Instead, both are supposed to assemble the Nvidia hardware into AI servers before passing them along to a final customer, and it is not publicly known who that customer is.
Ties to sanctioned suppliers
The paper trail behind these two companies is where things get uncomfortable. New Matrix’s founder, Li Bin, is connected to Wise Road, a Chinese private equity firm the U.S. has already sanctioned for helping Beijing acquire sensitive chip technology. Li also chairs Tsinghua Unigroup, a tech conglomerate partly owned by the Chinese government, and owns New H3C Semiconductor Technologies, which is on the Commerce Department’s Entity List for cooperating with the Chinese military. Maginfra, meanwhile, is suspected of sharing personnel, patents, and ownership structure with Inspur, a company blacklisted since 2023 for supporting the People’s Liberation Army. A third approved buyer, Zhejiang Yindun Cloud Technology, reportedly has executives related to the founder of Range Intelligent Computing Technology Group, a data center operator that has sold compute capacity to Chinese military contractors, and it reportedly operates partly out of a Range data center.
Concerns about how licenses are approved
Former White House National Security Council China director Liza Tobin told the Times she has “a ton of concerns” that neither the Commerce Department nor Nvidia is doing enough due diligence to make sure licensing terms are actually being followed.
The bottom line
The investigation doesn’t show where any chips sent to New Matrix or Maginfra ended up, and it isn’t publicly known who their customers are. But empty offices and executives linked to blacklisted firms raise the question critics are now asking: whether the Commerce Department is scrutinizing each H200 license application or simply rubber-stamping them.
Source: Tom's Hardware
