Public procurement notices show Entity List institutions reaching Nvidia's most restricted chips through small domestic resellers and rental contracts, the channels new US chip-tracking proposals would target.
Northwestern Polytechnical University, a Xi’an institution on the US Entity List since 2001, bought two Nvidia H200 chips in October from a little-known Chinese supplier, according to a Reuters review of procurement records reported by Eduardo Baptista on November 11. An October 21 record on the university’s website shows its management school paid 874,700 yuan, about US$123,000, to Shaanxi Bosuan Network Technology for the chips, Reuters reported. Reuters could not find contact details for the seller.
The university also obtained access this year to H200 and other Nvidia processors through five computing rental contracts with Chinese companies. Among them were servers carrying A100 and A800 chips, which the United States bars from export to any Chinese entity. Northwestern Polytechnical, Nvidia and the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security did not respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.
The records do not show where the chips originated or where the rented servers sit. Even so, they show a university that Washington has treated as a defense research body for 25 years buying and renting Nvidia hardware that US rules either bar from China outright or, in the H200’s case, license to Chinese buyers one case at a time.
Procurement notices put prices on restricted chips
Northwestern Polytechnical researches military aircraft, missiles and satellites and is one of the "Seven Sons of National Defense" universities under US sanctions. The Commerce Department added it to the Entity List in 2001 and adopted a presumption of denial for most export license applications in 2019, United Daily News reported, carrying a Central News Agency report. Since January the Trump administration has allowed some H200 exports to China case by case, but that policy does not lift the restrictions on listed organizations.
Northwestern Polytechnical’s cybersecurity school signed two seven-month contracts in January for servers carrying eight H200 chips each. They were worth 441,700 yuan and 441,000 yuan and covered fine-tuning AI models and reinforcement-learning training. Points Media, an online outlet founded by Hong Kong journalists working abroad, said the October notice was titled as a results announcement for an H200 graphics card procurement project, and that the university removed it from its website after the Reuters report appeared.
Reuters reviewed 26 Chinese procurement and corporate records from this year that show other universities doing the same. Shenzhen University bought three H100 processors for 769,800 yuan in September. Wuhan University of Technology bought a server with an H100 chip for 355,000 yuan in June and four A100 chips for 344,000 yuan in a separate purchase. Beihang University, another Seven Sons school, bought four A800 processors for 489,000 yuan in April, Liberty Times also reported from the Reuters findings. Two government announcements for the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences in July and September named suppliers providing computing on H800 and A800 chips, one at 10 yuan per chip-hour.
Rentals and resellers sit outside the export license
Northwestern Polytechnical did not buy from Nvidia directly, and the suppliers named across the records were little-known Chinese technology firms. The records offer little information about where the processors originated or where the rented servers operated, even though Chinese law requires public procurement agencies to verify that suppliers can fulfill orders, Reuters noted.
Rental is the harder channel to police. The January licensing rules for H200 exports require safeguards to stop blacklisted entities and military end users from reaching the chips remotely, yet a university renting a server from a domestic provider never appears as the buyer of the hardware. Reuters has previously reported restricted Nvidia chips reaching China inside Super Micro, Dell and Gigabyte servers sold through domestic resellers, and through an underground market supplied from overseas inventories and third-country intermediaries. EastFrontier has tracked a similar pattern in financing records for leased B300 servers.
The sums involved are modest. Another university institute paid 375,000 yuan in April for computing that required at least 24 A100 chips, for structural and fluid-dynamics simulation, and a Shenzhen public institution bought six A100 chips worth 484,800 yuan in a January award. What stands out is who is buying and how openly the purchases were recorded.
Huang faces a congressional briefing on November 18
The findings arrive as Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang faces scrutiny in Washington over his lobbying for looser sales rules to China and over reports that he was targeted by a Chinese spying operation; Nvidia’s board has opened a review of Huang’s ties to an alleged spy. Lawmakers from both parties want tighter controls such as chip-tracking requirements, and three Republican committee chairmen have requested a briefing with Huang on November 18 about his reported contacts with an alleged Chinese intelligence operative.
That briefing will keep Nvidia’s China sales in front of lawmakers while these records circulate. Any Commerce Department move to cover domestic resale and rental inside China, or a chip-tracking mandate written into law, would reach the channels these procurement notices expose. Entity List additions naming domestic resellers such as Shaanxi Bosuan would be a narrower step in the same direction.