Lava uncovers banned Nvidia chips linked to China Telecom addresses

Israeli security firm Lava has identified 32 Nvidia Blackwell Ultra B300 chips linked to IP addresses connected to China Telecom, the state-owned carrier. US export controls bar the sale of these chips to China on national security grounds. The chips weren’t found through a raid or a customs seizure. Lava spotted them because someone left a monitoring dashboard open to the internet. The findings were first reported by The Information on October 22, 2026. How a monitoring tool gave the game away Lava traced the chips through publicly exposed instances of Nvidia’s DCGM Exporter. This is a monitoring tool that operators use to keep tabs on their GPUs. Many operators leave the tool unsecured, according to the research. Those exposed endpoints reveal what hardware is running behind them. In this case, the hardware included 32 B300 chips, and the associated IP addresses pointed back to China Telecom. There is an important distinction worth keeping in view. Lava’s work links the chips to IP addresses connected to the carrier. That is a network association, and it is a different thing from confirming who physically owns the hardware or exactly where it sits. The research describes the B300...