While President Trump reiterated earlier this month that he doesn’t want China getting its hands on Nvidia’s most advanced AI chips, a Chinese AI company has found a convenient loophole: Indonesia.
An investigation by the Wall Street Journal reveals that around 2,300 of said chips have been procured by said Chinese AI company – and has traced how “a chain of deals across several countries got the chips inside the data center, which is wedged between a private school and an upscale apartment complex. A company that arranged the transaction is a subsidiary of a Chinese business on an American trade blacklist.”
And the kicker: none of it appears to have violated US law.
China has notably been barred from buying advanced US semiconductors since 2022 over national-security concerns. And while Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang insists that Nvidia’s market share in China has ‘fallen to zero’ from 95% due to the US export restrictions – which is clearly not the case.
Some bring the chips physically into China using middlemen. Another increasingly popular workaround, which has been employed in Australia and Malaysia, is renting computing power abroad and bringing data out of China and back—sometimes by packing suitcases with hard drives, the Journal has previously reported.
In the Indonesia case, the Journal was able to trace the chips from start to finish, including the specific entities involved. American technology is being made available to a Chinese company through these four steps. -WSJ
Here’s how it works:
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Nvidia sells chips to a U.S. partner partly owned by a Chinese firm
Nvidia supplies advanced AI chips to Aivres, a Silicon Valley server builder whose parent company is one-third owned by Inspur—a Chinese tech firm placed on a U.S. national-security blacklist in 2023. While Nvidia is barred from dealing with Inspur or its blacklisted subsidiaries, the restrictions don’t extend to U.S.-based entities like Aivres, allowing the business relationship to continue.
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Aivres finds an overseas buyer for high-end Nvidia servers
In mid-2024, Aivres negotiated a $100 million deal to sell 32 Nvidia GB200 server racks – containing roughly 2,300 Blackwell-generation chips – to Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison’s cloud-computing division in Indonesia. Indosat is jointly owned by Qatar’s Ooredoo and Hong Kong’s CK Hutchison.
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The Indonesian buyer lines up a Chinese AI startup as the end user
Indosat agreed to purchase the servers only after securing a major client facilitated by Aivres: Shanghai-based AI startup INF Tech. Negotiations also included representatives from Fudan University, where INF’s founder, Qi Yuan, directs an AI institute.
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The Chinese startup intends to use the chips for finance and medical AI
By October, the servers had arrived in Indonesia and were being set up. INF plans to use the computing power to train AI models for financial analytics and scientific research, including drug-discovery applications.
According to attorneys familiar with export-control rules, as long as the Chinese company isn’t directly using the chips to help China with military intelligence or weapons of mass destruction, the arrangement doesn’t violate any laws set by the Trump administration.
Interestingly, the Journal reports that in the waning days of the Biden Autopen administration, a rule was created that would have tightened controls over the sale of advanced US chips to countries such as Indonesia that aren’t in a small group of US allies – yet, the Trump administration later said it wouldn’t enforce the rule, which would have given the US a chance to scrutinize the customer’s intentions, along with the exporter – particularly if they were on a national-security trade blacklist known as the “entity list.”
One way or another, China gets their racks. (h/t Capital.news)
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