China's state money bought banned Nvidia B300 servers, then redacted the receipts
Credit filings show a Shenzhen- and Beijing-controlled lessor financed 700-plus servers for an AI developer, 32 of them Asus machines on restricted B300 Blackwell silicon, bound for a China Mobile hub. The same state that meters Nvidia's legal channel financed the restricted one, then scrubbed the paperwork.
Vincent Jiang · 3 min read
Credit filings with China's central bank put the state itself inside the gray market for Nvidia's banned silicon. The filings, described this week in reporting on the registry documents, show Semi-Tech Leasing Group financed purchases of servers running the restricted B300 Blackwell chip, including one deal that funded 32 Asustek machines, part of more than 700 servers bought by AI developer Glory View Technology 12.
The filing names the state as the financier
Semi-Tech was founded with national semiconductor fund money and is now majority-controlled by municipal entities in Shenzhen and Beijing, with more than ¥11bn ($1.6bn) deployed into compute infrastructure 12. Sale-and-leaseback deals from mid-2025 handed Glory View over ¥3bn ($450m), and most of the hardware was slated for a China Mobile computing hub in Ningxia, a node in the state-backed data center network 12.
Then the paperwork was scrubbed
Once the filings drew scrutiny, Semi-Tech resubmitted them with hardware descriptions, supplier details and server model designations removed 12. Nvidia says it is investigating with its equipment manufacturing partners; Asus says it complies with export controls 1. The Inference has not reviewed the filings directly; their contents are known only through the reporting.
There is no legal door for B300s
The B300, a Blackwell Ultra part, sits under the strictest US control, a presumption of license denial for China, while the older H200 moved to case-by-case review in January 3. Taiwan indicted nine people on 24 August over 130 diverted B300 servers, naming an Nvidia distribution manager as the man who certified the gate open 3. Washington has requested $450m and about 1,077 enforcement positions for fiscal 2027, nearly doubling the export-control budget 3.
Beijing meters the front door and pays for the back one
Washington cleared roughly ten Chinese firms to buy H200s, up to 75,000 chips each with 25% of the revenue routed to the US Treasury 4. Beijing's NDRC signs off on every purchase anyway, and the first deliveries, about 10,000 chips each to ByteDance and Tencent, covered 13% of each quota 5. State-funded projects have been barred from foreign accelerators since November 2025 5, yet state-controlled money was financing them, into a state carrier's hub. TrendForce projects domestic chips from Huawei, Cambricon and Biren at nearly 90% of China's 2026 market 5.
First H200 deliveries covered just 13% of each approved quota
- Approved H200 quota
- First deliveries
Data
| Approved H200 quota | First deliveries | |
|---|---|---|
| ByteDance | 75,000 | 10,000 |
| Tencent | 75,000 | 10,000 |
Nvidia's optionality, Cambricon's moat, Asus's exposure
Nvidia's China sales ran below 1% of data center revenue last quarter, so the reopened-China trade is pure optionality, resting on approvals Beijing is still weighing, including RTX Pro 5500 chips and a potential one-million-unit ByteDance order 6. A financing crackdown hits that optionality; looking away lets restricted silicon dilute the domestic champions, Cambricon among them, whose case rests on Nvidia staying locked out 56. Asus carries the named-supplier compliance exposure 1. Watch Nvidia's investigation, the NDRC queue, and whether Congress answers with the Chip Security Act's hardware-level trackers 3.
More about NVIDIA
NVDA · Fiscal Q2 2027Revenue rose 106% to $96.2B, 92.5% of it from Data Center, “driven by the ramp of our Blackwell Ultra infrastructure”. Gains on equity stakes of $7.8B lifted net income to $59.7B.
Show as a table
| Line | Value |
|---|---|
| Revenue | $96.2B |
| Gross margin | 75.0% |
| Operating margin | 66.2% |
| Net income | $59.7B |
| Hyperscale | $48.7B |
| AI clouds & enterprise | $40.3B |
| Data Center | $89.0B |
| Edge Computing | $7.2B |
| Gross profit | $72.1B |
| Cost of revenue | $24.1B |
| Other income | $7.8B |
| Operating income | $63.7B |
| Operating expenses | $8.4B |
| Tax | $11.8B |
| R&D | $7.1B |
| SG&A | $1.4B |
Deepdive
AI-generated from this story and its cited sources. Not investment advice.
