The United States keeps approving Chinese companies to buy Nvidia’s most advanced AI chips. At least one of those approved companies appears to exist mainly on paper.
A New York Times investigation found New Matrix on the government’s list of firms cleared to buy Nvidia’s H200 accelerators. The company’s listed office is empty. Reporters described “a hollow gray shell with wires dangling from the ceiling where lights should be.”
The building directory does not include New Matrix at all. Staff at the industrial park’s property management agency said they had no record of the company. New Matrix was registered 17 months ago, and very little about it can be found online.
Owners tied to a blacklisted firm
Public records link New Matrix’s owners to a Chinese private equity firm. The US government blacklisted that firm in 2024 over national security concerns. Those ties should have raised questions during any serious vetting process.
The Times reports that this is not an isolated mistake. It describes a pattern of approvals for companies connected to entities under trade restrictions. Each approval pushes advanced American hardware into supply chains the export rules were written to constrain.
How the guardrails slipped
Nvidia could not sell advanced chips to China during the Biden administration. The Trump administration relaxed those limits after Nvidia agreed to give the government 15 percent of all sales. CEO Jensen Huang also ran an intense lobbying campaign. China’s Ministry of State Security reportedly targeted him in a spying plot.
Export controls depend on knowing exactly who receives the hardware. An empty office with dangling wires defeats that purpose entirely. It also hands critics of the arrangement an easy argument.
The Commerce Department has not explained how New Matrix passed its review. Nvidia has not said whether it inspected the company’s physical operations. Neither firm responded publicly to the Times findings.
This lands as Washington debates how much computing power should flow to China. Chip supply is now a foreign policy lever, and the paperwork behind it looks thin. The memory crunch around AI hardware makes every approval more valuable to the buyer.
Related reading on mylistingo: TSMC weighs entering the RAM business and the DOJ inquiry into Nvidia’s Hugging Face deal.
Source: The Verge, citing reporting by The New York Times.
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