A Chinese company cleared by the United States to handle Nvidia’s most powerful AI chips allowed into China lists an office that, when reporters visited it, turned out to be an empty shell. The firm was created 17 months ago, barely exists on paper, and its owners are tied to a fund the US has blacklisted. The finding puts Washington’s vetting of advanced chip exports under fresh scrutiny.
What the investigation found
The New York Times reported on Saturday that New Matrix, a company approved to assemble Nvidia H200 chips into AI servers, lists an address in an industrial park on Beijing’s north-west edge. Reporters who visited found ‘a hollow gray shell with wires dangling from the ceiling where lights should be,’ and the building’s directory did not list the company.
At the nearby property management agency, a receptionist and a manager both said they had no record of the firm. Little about New Matrix can be found online, and the Times said it could find scant evidence that the company exists in any meaningful way. Its owners are tied to a Chinese private-equity fund blacklisted by the US in 2024.
The Times presents the case as part of a pattern, not a one-off lapse. Roughly two dozen Chinese companies have been cleared to buy or handle H200 chips, including Baidu and BYD. Another firm, Maginfra, had an office that appeared deserted in September, and shares staff and patents with Inspur, a server maker on the US Entity List.
How the chips got cleared
Sales of H200 chips to China were blocked under the Biden administration. The Trump administration relaxed the limits in December 2025, after Nvidia agreed to give the US government a 15 percent cut of the sales. The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security vets each buyer for national security risk before clearing a sale.
The vetting was supposed to be the safeguard. Under the licensing policy set out in January 2026, buyers must show they can protect the hardware, screen their customers and comply with export controls. The Times’ findings raise the question of how a firm with no visible office passed those checks — and whether the checks looked beyond the paperwork.
The clearance matters because the hardware is already piling up. About 600,000 H200 chips are sitting in Hong Kong waiting on Beijing’s import approval, and Nvidia has tied its cloud partners to chip-tracking requirements as Washington watches where the processors end up.
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An empty office is not proof that chips were diverted — the reporting is careful on that point, and no evidence has been published that an H200 reached a restricted user through New Matrix. But the finding does not need a diversion to matter: the licensing regime exists to vet the buyer before the chip moves.
A 17-month-old firm with no office, no directory listing and owners tied to a blacklisted fund passing that vetting is a failure of the process itself. The 15 percent revenue share made the sales politically possible; it did nothing to make the vetting better, and the gap between the two is now the story.
What happens next is procedural, and that is the point. Congress is seeking answers from Nvidia on the programme, and Commerce extended its pause on a rule applying blacklist restrictions to firms half-owned by blacklisted parties. A review, a revoked licence or a tighter rule would all be quiet outcomes — and any of them would confirm the finding.
Why It Matters
The H200 is the most powerful AI chip Washington currently allows Nvidia to sell to China, and the licences are the control that makes that sale acceptable. If the vetting cannot spot an empty office, the control is weaker than advertised — and the next question is not whether one firm slipped through, but how many others did.
For Nvidia, the stakes are commercial as well as political. The company’s chips are already a smuggling target — Malaysian authorities seized $12.1 million in smuggled AI chips last month — and every new doubt about its China vetting gives Washington a reason to tighten the rules that govern its largest growth market.
Background
Nvidia was barred from selling its most advanced chips to China under the Biden administration, and the H200 became the test case for a controlled reopening: sales resumed in December 2025 with the US taking a share of the proceeds. Shipments to China-based customers were still under one percent of Nvidia’s data centre revenue in the quarter ended in July.
Source: The Verge’s account of the New York Times investigation
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