Nvidia chip export loophole clouds US-China AI summit talks

Asia Times | Jeff Pao

Aivres, a server company from California, shipped more than $5.6 billion in advanced tech to Southeast Asia between April 2024 and February 2026. US export controls? They managed to sidestep them. The New York Times reported that over $3 billion of this was computers loaded with Nvidia’s latest Blackwell chips. Where did these go? Straight to Chinese giants like ByteDance and Alibaba.

How did they do it? Inspur, the parent company, simply cut its stake in the US-based Aivres to 33%. That was enough to dodge the Department of Commerce’s 50% Affiliates Rule. The loophole is still wide open. Now, lawmakers are pushing the Remote Access Security Act (RASA) to clamp down on remote cloud access to sensitive tech. All this is sure to be front and centre when President Xi visits the White House on 24 September.

Comment

Inspur Group’s move through its US-based affiliate Aivres shows just how easy it is to get around rules that focus only on who physically owns the tech. By holding just 33% in Aivres, Inspur kept the door open to Nvidia Blackwell GPUs. The regulators were left playing catch-up.

The trick is simple: hardware ownership and who actually uses the computing power are now two different things. Even if you block shipments of Blackwell chips to China, Chinese companies can just rent the same power from cloud data centres in Southeast Asia. So, instead of checking boxes at the port, regulators now have to chase invisible workloads in the cloud. Not an easy job.

Strategic Question for Discussion

Which carries more weight in limiting Chinese AI development — the physical interdiction of Nvidia Blackwell GPUs under the Bureau of Industry and Security's rules, or the legislative closure of the cloud computing loophole via the Remote Access Security Act?

If you ask me, shutting the cloud loophole with the Remote Access Security Act matters much more than stopping physical shipments. Sure, the Bureau of Industry and Security can track boxes of Nvidia Blackwell GPUs, but Chinese firms just go around the problem by using overseas data centres. As long as they can tap into cloud computing, they can keep training their AI models like DeepSeek. Physical border checks are now just a sideshow.

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