A Silicon Valley server maker kept shipping some of Nvidia's most advanced chips to Southeast Asia for nearly two years after its Chinese parent company was blacklisted by Washington, according to an investigation that has renewed scrutiny of gaps in U.S. export enforcement just as American and Chinese officials prepare for their first formal talks on artificial intelligence.
The company, Aivres Systems Inc., is the American subsidiary of Inspur Group, a Chinese server giant that the Commerce Department added to its Entity List in March 2023 over concerns it was seeking military supercomputing technology. Between April 2024 and February 2026, Aivres exported at least $5.6 billion in advanced technology to Southeast Asia, including more than $3 billion in computers equipped with Nvidia's Blackwell chips, the company's most capable AI accelerators. Servers built with that hardware ultimately supplied data centers that gave Chinese customers, including Alibaba Group Holding and ByteDance, access to compute that is barred from direct sale to China.
The mechanism was simple. Inspur's Silicon Valley office kept the same staff and the same address but began marketing itself under the Aivres name around August 2023, months after its parent was blacklisted. Because the Entity List names specific companies rather than ownership structures, Aivres itself was never added to it. Filings reviewed by reporters found Inspur's stake in Aivres at roughly 33%, below the 50% ownership threshold that the Commerce Department's newer affiliates rule, which took effect in September 2025, uses to automatically extend restrictions to related entities.
From there, the hardware moved through intermediaries. Aivres shipped servers to Malaysia-based firms, including a company called Megaspeed and a cloud provider known as Aolani Cloud, which then sold computing capacity to customers in China. A separate, Chinese state-owned company called Maginfra, based near Inspur's headquarters and sharing overlapping inventors and executives with Inspur despite no formal ownership link on paper, imported more than $700 million in servers from Malaysia into China in a six-month span.
An enforcement gap left open
Trade researchers say the pattern points to something more organized than an isolated loophole. William George of the trade-data firm ImportGenius, who has tracked the shipments, put it bluntly.
It's very hard to look at this and not see a state-sponsored Chinese network for bypassing export controls.
William George, ImportGenius
The Commerce Department has not added a single Chinese company to the Entity List in ten months, the longest such gap in 18 years, and the Trump administration separately approved licenses allowing Maginfra to purchase Nvidia's less advanced H200 chips. Congress has moved to close the underlying gap even as enforcement has lagged. The House passed the Remote Access Security Act by a vote of 369-22 in January, which would extend export controls to remote cloud access rather than just physical chip shipments, closing the exact channel Southeast Asian data centers have used to reach Chinese customers. The bill remains stalled in the Senate. A related measure, the Chip Security Act, cleared the House Foreign Affairs Committee in March but has not reached a floor vote.
Shares of Inspur Electronic Information Industry Co., the parent's publicly traded unit, fell 3.8% after the findings were reported, a modest but notable reaction given how little direct exposure the company had previously acknowledged to Chinese AI chip access through its American arm.
What comes next
The disclosure complicates an AI dialogue between Washington and Beijing that is expected to take up, among other things, whether Southeast Asian data centers should continue to provide Chinese firms remote access to Nvidia-powered compute. It also raises pressure on the Senate to act on the Remote Access Security Act before the next reporting period, when researchers say similar transshipment patterns are likely to surface again absent a change to how the Entity List treats renamed or restructured subsidiaries. For now, Nvidia's own public guidance continues to assume zero direct data-center chip sales to China, even as billions of dollars in its hardware reach Chinese firms through routes that were never designed to be closed.
