15:29 - 25.07.2025

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July 25, Fineko/abc.az. At least $1 bn worth of Nvidia’s advanced artificial intelligence processors were shipped to China in the three months after Donald Trump tightened chip export controls, exposing the limits of Washington’s efforts to restrain Beijing’s high-tech ambitions, ABC.AZ reports, referring to Financial Times.

A Financial Times analysis of dozens of sales contracts, company filings and multiple people with direct knowledge of the deals reveals that Nvidia’s B200 has become the most sought-after — and widely available — chip in a rampant Chinese black market for American semiconductors.

The processor is widely used by US powerhouses such as OpenAI, Google and Meta to train their latest AI systems, but banned for sale to China.

In May, multiple Chinese distributors started selling B200s to suppliers of data centres that serve Chinese AI groups, according to documents reviewed by the FT. This was shortly after the Trump administration moved to prevent sales of the H20 — a less-powerful Nvidia chip tailored to comply with Joe Biden-era curbs.

It is legal to receive and sell restricted Nvidia chips in China, as long as relevant border tariffs are paid, according to lawyers familiar with the rules. Entities selling and sending them to China would be violating US regulations, however.

In mid-July, The Wall Street Journal wrote that representatives of the Trump administration were preventing the completion of work on an agreement for the purchase of billions of dollars worth of advanced Nvidia AI chips by the UAE "for national security reasons". Negotiations between the U.S. and the UAE have reached an impasse due to Washington's concerns about a possible technology leak to China.