Blacklisted Inspur's US Arm Shipped $5.6B in Nvidia Chips

Aivres, a blacklisted Inspur subsidiary, shipped $5.6B in Nvidia chips, clouding US-China AI summit talks.

According to The New York Times, as reported by Asia Times, Aivres — a California-based server maker that is Inspur Group's US-based subsidiary — exported at least $5.6 billion in advanced technology to Southeast Asia between April 2024 and February 2026, including more than $3 billion in computers equipped with Nvidia's most advanced Blackwell chips. Those servers ultimately served Chinese customers including ByteDance and Alibaba, the newspaper found after reviewing thousands of shipping records, corporate documents and supply contracts and interviewing more than a dozen officials, executives and analysts. The core anomaly: Inspur Group itself was added to the US Entity List in March 2023, yet Aivres does not appear on the list, allowing it to legally purchase Nvidia's top chips as a US entity.

Asia Times lays out a sequence of structural moves that kept the GPU channel alive. In August 2023, Inspur Electronic Information Industry's interim report renamed its wholly owned US distribution unit Aivres Systems Inc., dropping the Inspur Systems name. By April 2024, the listed unit's annual report no longer mentioned Aivres at all. In March 2025, the Bureau of Industry and Security added six Inspur subsidiaries to the Entity List without naming Aivres, and when BIS's 50% Affiliates Rule took effect in September 2025, the Wall Street Journal reported Inspur held just a 33% stake in Aivres — below the threshold. The report sparked a market reaction: Inspur's Shenzhen-listed unit fell 3.8% on Monday to 74.74 yuan. An eastmoney.com columnist told Asia Times that any sanctions on Aivres would shut the channel and pressure the wider Inspur system's supply of high-end GPUs.

The timing is awkward for diplomacy. Reuters reports the planned mid-September US-China AI summit would be the first official AI dialogue since President Trump's second term began, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent expected to lead the US delegation and an agenda covering AI-directed cyberattacks, threat-intelligence sharing between AI labs, and concerns about Chinese firms distilling American models. The Aivres revelations add fresh uncertainty to talks a White House official said had not been finalized. The dispute also feeds into President Xi Jinping's scheduled September 24 White House visit, where the leaders are expected to discuss whether Washington will keep allowing Southeast Asian data centers to give Chinese firms cloud access to computing power from Nvidia's top GPUs.

Congress is moving to close the arrangement at the heart of the dispute. The House passed the Remote Access Security Act 369-22 in January, and it would require a US export license for Chinese firms leasing remote access to Nvidia-powered servers in Southeast Asia; the House Foreign Affairs Committee also passed the Chip Security Act in March. As Washington tightens controls, some allies are hedging in the opposite direction: The Bureau reports that Canada revived its formal Defence Coordination Dialogue with China's PLA on September 4, the first such meeting in eight years, with senior officers including Eastern Theater Command commander Gen. Yang Zhibin attending — news Canadians learned of only from Beijing's defense ministry, as no Canadian government readout had appeared as of September 7.