China’s smugglers are charging silly money for Nvidia AI kit as Washington squeezes the chip back channels.
According to the Financial Times, Nvidia’s AI chips have more than doubled in price on China’s black market, as US export controls collide with stubborn Chinese demand.
Its DGX B300 server has climbed to more than Rmb8mn, about €1.03mn, during the past six months, up from Rmb4mn, about €517,000.
The eight-Blackwell GPU box normally sells in the US for about $400,000, which makes the China markup look properly bonkers. Nvidia’s RTX 6000 Pro workstation chip, popular with start-ups running large language models, has risen from about Rmb50,000, about €6,500, to as much as Rmb130,000, about €16,800.
The RTX 6000 and DGX B300 are barred from export to China, which has given the grey market a lovely excuse to empty wallets.
“The loopholes have shrunk. It is becoming more and more risky for intermediaries to trade these chips as prices have surged,” said one trader who sells to large data centre clients.
Supplies were hit after US authorities stepped up investigations into illicit chip exports late last year, traders told the FT. In March, a Supermicro co-founder was charged with a Taiwan-based employee and a contractor over claims they smuggled $2.5bn of Nvidia AI servers to Chinese customers.
Supermicro was not named as a defendant. The outfit said it “maintains a robust compliance programme and is committed to full adherence to all applicable US export and re-export control laws and regulations”.
Taiwanese and Malaysian authorities have started probing chip smuggling operations, targeting popular re-export routes into China.
In a statement, Nvidia said trying to “cobble together” data centres from smuggled products is a “dead-end”.
“AI data centres are massive and complex, building out of contraband is extremely difficult and we do not provide any support or repairs for restricted products. Our compliance efforts have repeatedly stopped would-be smugglers, who risk prosecution on both sides of the globe,” it added.
Chinese authorities have tightened scrutiny of Nvidia products, including the H20 and H200, as Beijing pushes Huawei and other local alternatives. Huawei has released its Ascend 950PR AI processor, but traders said Chinese buyers are still snapping up Nvidia gaming processors and older A100 accelerators.
“Stocks of A100s are selling out very quickly. Companies don’t have a choice but to buy the old ones,” one trader told the FT.
Servers using A100 chips have jumped from about Rmb200,000, about €25,900, late last year to as much as Rmb600,000, about €77,600.
US president Donald Trump approved H200 licences for some Chinese companies, but Chinese customs authorities have been told not to permit imports.
Several traders said H200 processors can still be bought through Hong Kong, with some chips hidden inside servers otherwise cleared for import.
“No one dares to do this at scale. You can go against the American rules, but not the Chinese,” said one trader.
The squeeze has pushed up GPU rental prices in China, which now match or beat US levels for some Blackwell-based systems.
“Prices of all products have skyrocketed. Many people have reduced their demand at these prices. It’s been a difficult year,” one seller said.
