Chinese Blackwell deal revealed

A Chinese financing company owned by several local government entities has funded the purchase of restricted Nvidia Corp chips, according to documents filed with Beijing regulators, suggesting state support for an illicit trade that Washington worries is fueling China’s AI progress.

Over the past year, Semi-Tech Leasing Group Co has provided capital to another company called Glory View Technology Co (宏景科技) for the purchase of more than 700 servers, the documents show. One contract identifies funding for 32 units of Asustek Computer Inc (華碩) servers equipped with Nvidia’s B300 chips, bought from a separate Chinese company about which little public information is available.

The regulatory filings give a glimpse into a trade that US President Donald Trump has made clear he does not want to see happen and years of Washington restrictions have sought to prevent. The B300 is part of Nvidia’s powerful Blackwell family of products, and US regulations forbid their sale to China absent an explicit license.

People visit Nvidia’s booth during the Fifth Global Digital Trade Fair in Hangzhou in China’s Zhejiang Province on Sept. 22.

Photo: AFP

However, the rules have failed to entirely stop the movement of those prized semiconductors. Government authorities have alleged that black-market brokers have smuggled into China billions of US dollars worth of Nvidia hardware, including Blackwell chips — exploiting what some US officials see as glaring gaps in corporate due diligence and weak government enforcement.

An order of 32 servers — model name XA NB3I-E12 — is small. While hundreds of other servers that Semi-Tech Leasing purchased match the specifications for Nvidia Blackwell chips, the documents do not explicitly identify the hardware in question. Still, the records point to a key dynamic of the illicit trade: the Chinese government, at least in this instance, has helped make it happen.

Nvidia said it is “looking into this report and will work with our OEM customer to investigate,” a reference to so-called original equipment manufacturers like Asus that buy Nvidia chips and assemble them into servers. Asus said in a statement that the company “is committed to strict compliance with all applicable laws and regulations, including export controls.”

Semi-Tech Leasing, which in June changed its name from Sino IC Leasing Co (芯鑫融資), was set up in 2015 by the China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund — colloquially known as the Big Fund — to provide financial support to the semiconductor industry. After the Big Fund sold most of its shares in 2020, local governments in Shenzhen, Beijing and other provinces have jointly controlled most of Semi-Tech Leasing’s shares, according to Chinese company registry information.

In recent years, Semi-Tech Leasing has expanded its remit to data center infrastructure and deployed more than 11 billion yuan (US$1.6 billion) to “create an ecosystem encompassing model training, chips and other aspects of the AI industry,” the company’s chairman said at an April financial conference in Shanghai, according to local reports. Semi-Tech Leasing, he added, “spares no effort in serving and supporting national strategy.”