US agency reviews Chinese AI firms’ access to Nvidia chips through overseas channels

A US government agency is conducting a sweeping review of how Chinese AI companies have been getting their hands on Nvidia’s most advanced chips, even as Washington has spent years trying to cut off that exact pipeline. The review, reported by Bloomberg on August 7, 2026, zeroes in on a strategy that’s been hiding in plain sight: rather than importing chips directly into China, where export controls block the shipments, Chinese firms have been renting computing power from data centers in other countries. The loophole that moved hundreds of thousands of chips US export restrictions prevent Nvidia from shipping its most powerful processors directly to China. But those same rules, until recently, didn’t stop Nvidia chips from ending up in data centers in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, or elsewhere, where Chinese companies could then lease access to them remotely. Industry estimates suggest that hundreds of thousands of advanced chips may have been delivered to Chinese entities through this regulatory gap before Washington moved to close it. The urgency behind this review appears directly tied to recent Chinese AI breakthroughs that demonstrated effective utilization of Nvidia’s rest...