The New York Times found that New Matrix and Maginfra, two Chinese firms cleared by the Commerce Department to receive Nvidia H200 AI chips, list offices that appear abandoned, and that their owners and staff tie back to US-sanctioned companies. About two dozen firms hold approvals.
Two Chinese companies the US government cleared to receive Nvidia’s H200 AI chips appear to exist mostly on paper, according to a New York Times investigation published November 7. Reporters visited the listed offices of New Matrix and Maginfra and found empty rooms, and people in the buildings said they had never heard of the firms. The Commerce Department approves each H200 export license, so the findings put its vetting in question.
What the Times found
The details below come from the Times, as summarized by Tom’s Hardware and The Verge.
| Company | What reporters found | Reported ties |
|---|---|---|
| New Matrix | Created 17 months ago. A building directory did not list it, and the industrial park’s property managers had no record of it. | Founder Li Bin and two other main owners connect to Wise Road, a private equity firm the US sanctioned for helping Beijing acquire chip technology. Li also chairs Tsinghua Unigroup and owns New H3C Semiconductor Technologies, which is on the Commerce Department’s Entity List. |
| Maginfra | Office was an empty shell with some furniture. | Shares personnel, patents and a similar government ownership structure with Inspur, blacklisted by the US since 2023 for supporting China’s military. |
| Zhejiang Yindun Cloud Technology | Reportedly operates partly out of a data center run by Range Intelligent Computing Technology Group. | Executives are reportedly related to Range’s founder; Range has sold computing capacity to Chinese military contractors. |
New Matrix and Maginfra are not listed as the final users of the chips. Their approvals cover assembling H200s into AI servers that then go to customers, and the Times could not establish who those customers are.
Who else holds approvals
According to Tom’s Hardware’s account of the Times report, about two dozen Chinese companies have H200 approvals. The list includes Baidu, BYD, Tesla Shanghai, Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance and ZTE, which the US previously blacklisted. “I have a ton of concerns that neither the Commerce Department or Nvidia is doing the due diligence needed to ensure that the licensing terms are being followed,” Liza Tobin, a former China director at the White House National Security Council, told the Times.
The approvals follow a policy reversal. President Trump banned Nvidia AI GPU exports to China in April 2025, then allowed H200 sales in exchange for the US government taking a share of revenue. Shipments were delayed for months because Beijing at first told its companies not to buy the chips, Tom’s Hardware reports.
What to do
- Nothing changes for US buyers. The reporting concerns export licenses to China. Nvidia GPU availability and pricing in the US are not affected by it today.
- If your company buys GPU capacity from cloud providers in Asia, ask where the hardware sits and who owns the data center. The Yindun example shows licensed chips can end up in facilities with links to sanctioned customers.
- Watch for a Commerce response. We will update this story if the department or Nvidia comments, or if any license changes.
Export licenses for Nvidia’s China sales could tighten again
The reporting gives critics of the H200 policy a specific list of names and addresses to cite. Our read is that a review of individual licenses is more likely than a reversal of the whole policy, because the revenue share is part of the arrangement. That is inference: neither the Commerce Department nor Nvidia had responded publicly in the coverage we reviewed. Any tightening would affect Nvidia’s China revenue and the Chinese server makers that assemble its chips.