32 Restricted Nvidia Chips Found Inside China Telecom's Network

Israeli security firm Lava says it identified 32 Nvidia Blackwell Ultra B300 processors running inside China Telecom's network. The state-owned carrier is China's largest telecommunications provider. Lava located the chips by using Nvidia's own DCGM Exporter, a tool data center operators install to track server health and performance. The firm said the software can often be reached from outside a data center's network and does not always require a password.

How the chips entered China Telecom's equipment, and where in the company's network they sit, remain unknown to Lava. Under current U.S. export rules, processors of this class can be sold only to whitelisted buyers who agree not to pass them on to sanctioned parties, a category that includes China. Nvidia did not dispute the finding. A spokesperson said court cases have shown diversion of controlled U.S. products at less than one half of one percent in recent proceedings, calling the level insignificant compared with the domestic computing capacity China already holds.

The B300 carries more capability than its predecessor. Nvidia announced the data center GPU in March 2025, and the company said it delivers 50 percent more memory and FP4 compute than the B200. Nvidia described it as built for the age of reasoning and named DeepSeek R1 among the large language models it targets. The chip was expected to ship by the end of 2025 and quickly became sought after. In August 2026, nine people were indicted in Taiwan over illegal exports of B300 GPUs to China. The indictments followed Supermicro's confirmation that it had fired several employees after an investigation into smuggling; the case involved Flying Tiget Tech, a Taiwanese server trading firm that held whitelisted status for GPU purchases.

Enforcement has not cooled demand. Servers built around the five-year-old A100 have tripled in price, and some buyers have turned to retooling gaming GPUs for AI workloads. A 2025 report said Chinese companies smuggled in $1 billion worth of Nvidia AI chips over three months, with B200 processors the most sought after at that time. Nvidia has said it is developing software that would let it locate its own chips. That tool has not been released. The company's spokesperson said the China Telecom finding demonstrates that smuggling is a nonfactor, blocked by governments on both sides of the globe.