Empty Offices and Sanctioned Ties: The Companies Cleared to Buy Nvidia H200s

Two Chinese companies approved to buy banned Nvidia H200 chips operate from empty offices, an investigation by The New York Times has found. Receptionists in the buildings did not recognize the firms. Neighbors said nobody had ever visited the rooms.

The findings raise a hard question about the U.S. Department of Commerce. Is it actually vetting export license applications, or rubber-stamping them?

What did the investigation find?

The two firms are New Matrix and Maginfra. Both received licenses to purchase Nvidia H200 GPUs. Both occupy, on paper at least, office spaces containing little more than furniture.

Their ties run deeper than vacant rooms. Public records show New Matrix was founded by Li Bin. Li and two other primary owners connect to Wise Road, a Chinese private equity firm sanctioned by the U.S. for helping Beijing acquire sensitive chip technologies. Li also chairs Tsinghua Unigroup, a conglomerate partly owned by the Chinese government, and owns New H3C Semiconductor Technologies, which sits on the Commerce Department's Entity List for cooperating with the Chinese military.

Maginfra is suspected of links to Inspur. Washington blacklisted Inspur in 2023 for supporting the People's Liberation Army. The two companies share personnel, patents, and a similar government ownership structure, according to the report.

The New Matrix website lists no owners and no corporate history. That alone should have prompted questions.

Who said what?

Liza Tobin, former China director for the White House National Security Council, told the publication: "I have a ton of concerns that neither the Commerce Department or Nvidia is doing the due diligence needed to ensure that the licensing terms are being followed."

Her remark carries weight. It comes from a former official who shaped China policy, not from a competitor or a lobbyist.

How did these firms pass screening?

That remains unclear. Neither company is listed as the final user of the chips. They are supposed to assemble the H200s into AI servers and forward them to an end customer. Who those customers are, nobody has disclosed.

The approved list is not made up only of unknowns. The Times reported roughly two dozen firms have received approval, including Baidu, BYD, Tesla Shanghai, Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance. It also includes ZTE, previously blacklisted from the U.S. market.

One more licensee raises flags. Zhejiang Yindun Cloud Technology counts executives related to the founder of Range Intelligent Computing Technology Group, a data center operator that has sold compute capacity to Chinese military contractors. The firm reportedly operates partly out of a Range data center.

What is the export backdrop?

President Donald Trump banned exports of Nvidia AI GPUs in April 2025. The ban covered even chips customized to meet Washington's performance ceiling. He reversed the decision late that year in exchange for a 25% cut of the sale.

The first H200 shipments still took more than eight months to reach China. Beijing initially refused to let Chinese firms buy the chips. Once China lifted its import ban, companies applied for licenses in quick succession.

The commercial stakes are large. Each approved firm gains access to hardware central to AI training and inference. The revenue flows to Nvidia and, by agreement, to the U.S. government. The oversight question sits at the center of that trade.

What happens next?

Neither Commerce nor Nvidia has publicly explained the vetting process that cleared New Matrix and Maginfra. Until they do, every promise of end-use enforcement rests on unverified paperwork, and roughly two dozen licenses remain open to the same doubt.