Following revelations about Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) company Moonshot AI, a Chinese university has also been reported to have obtained top-end AI chips made by US semiconductor giant Nvidia through domestic suppliers.
Reuters reported, citing procurement records published on Northwestern Polytechnical University’s website on 21 October, that its School of Management spent 874,700 yuan (about S$168,086) that month on two Nvidia H200 chips. The chips were bought from Shaanxi Bosuan Network Technology Co Ltd, rather than directly from Nvidia.
Northwestern Polytechnical University is one of seven Chinese universities commonly known as the “Seven Sons of National Defence”. It comes directly under China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and is regarded as having close ties to the Chinese military. The US Commerce Department placed the university on its trade blacklist, known as the “Entity List”, in 2001 over its suspected involvement in missile proliferation activities and military research.
The US government began allowing some H200 chip exports to China in January this year, but did not lift the separate restrictions on institutions on the Entity List, such as Northwestern Polytechnical University.
Procurement records show that Northwestern Polytechnical University gained access to H200 chips and other high-performance Nvidia AI processors this year through five contracts to rent computing capacity from several Chinese companies.
The university’s School of Cybersecurity signed two seven-month contracts in January this year for access to servers, each equipped with eight H200 chips. The services covered AI model fine-tuning and reinforcement learning training.
Northwestern Polytechnical University also rented access to servers equipped with eight Nvidia A100 chips and eight A800 chips. Both chip models are currently banned from export to any entity in China.
Another research institute at the university spent 375,000 yuan in April on computing services for structural and fluid dynamics simulations. The services require at least 24 A100 chips.
The contracts were signed with several little-known Chinese technology suppliers. The records provided no clear information on where the processors originated or where the rented servers were physically operating.
After reviewing 26 procurement and corporate records from this year, Reuters found that several Chinese universities and research institutions had made such purchases through domestic suppliers. They included Shenzhen University, Wuhan University of Technology and Beihang University. Some of these institutions have close ties to the military. The findings also highlight gaps in Washington’s efforts to restrict China’s access to advanced technology.
Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang is facing growing scrutiny in Washington over his lobbying to ease restrictions on AI chip sales to China, particularly after he recently admitted to an extramarital affair with a businesswoman accused of spying for Beijing.
Reuters previously reported that Chinese institutions had bought restricted Nvidia chips through domestic distributors, embedded in servers from brands including Super Micro Computer, Dell and Gigabyte. It also reported an “underground market” in China for restricted Nvidia chips, sourced from overseas inventories and brought into the country through intermediaries in third countries.
Bloomberg reported on 10 November that Moonshot AI signed a contract with a Beijing supplier in August this year to rent a batch of servers equipped with Nvidia B300 graphics processing units within China, in a suspected breach of US controls.
