US export controls on AI chips rest on a simple promise: the government decides which foreign companies may receive Nvidia's hardware, and checks them first. A New York Times investigation, summarised by The Verge, suggests that promise is thinner than it looks. One Chinese firm cleared to handle Nvidia's H200 chips appears to exist mostly on paper.
The company is New Matrix, created 17 months ago and on the approved list. The Times found its listed office empty, describing a grey shell with wires hanging where lights should be. The building's company directory did not include it, and staff at the industrial park's property management office said they had no record of it. Little can be found about the firm online, and what can be found is worrying: its owners have ties to a Chinese private equity firm that the US has blacklisted since 2024.
The paper does not present this as a one-off. It describes a pattern in which companies linked to entities under national-security trade restrictions have been approved to buy Nvidia chips. That puts both the Commerce Department, which grants approvals, and Nvidia, which sells the hardware, under pressure over how carefully buyers are vetted.
The policy background is a trade. Nvidia was largely barred from selling these chips to China under the Biden administration. The Trump administration relaxed the limits after Nvidia agreed to give the government a 15% cut of the sales, while still requiring firm-by-firm approval and blocking the most powerful parts. Nvidia's chief executive, Jensen Huang, lobbied hard for the change, and is now the subject of a separate board inquiry, which we cover in a companion story, after reports that he was targeted by China's Ministry of State Security.
The H200 sits under much of the AI computing behind the models we review, so who can buy it matters well beyond trade policy. The report leaves open questions. It does not establish where any chips sent to New Matrix ended up, and neither Nvidia's nor the Commerce Department's response is given in the summary we read. Expect calls for tighter screening; if they succeed, Nvidia's China sales could slow, and if they do not, the approval list will carry less weight than its authors intended.