Concerns are mounting that the Commerce Department and Nvidia are not adequately vetting the Chinese companies cleared to buy the company’s H200 AI chips. According to reporting by The New York Times, one approved buyer, New Matrix, has offices that sit vacant, described as a bare gray interior with exposed wiring hanging where lighting should be. The newspaper reported that it could find little evidence the company carries on any substantive business.
Public information about New Matrix is sparse. The firm was established 17 months ago, according to the Times. Its listed address does not appear in the building’s company directory, and both a receptionist and a manager at the nearby property management office for the industrial park said they had no record of the company.
What information does exist raises flags. The owners of New Matrix have connections to a Chinese private equity firm that the US government has blacklisted since 2024. According to the Times, the case is not an isolated oversight but part of a broader pattern in which companies linked to entities facing national-security-related trade restrictions have won approval to purchase Nvidia chips.
The sales are possible because of a policy shift in Washington. Nvidia had been barred from selling chips to China under the Biden administration. The Trump administration loosened those restrictions after Nvidia agreed to hand the government a 15-percent share of all sales. Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang also mounted an aggressive lobbying push, and he was reportedly targeted by China’s Ministry of State Security in an espionage plot.
The arrangement puts the Commerce Department’s approval process for Nvidia’s China customers under scrutiny at a time when the US government holds a financial stake in those sales. The question raised by the Times reporting is whether the firms receiving the H200 chips are legitimate operations or shells connected to restricted entities, a distinction with direct implications for US national-security controls. Nvidia and the Commerce Department have not responded to the concerns in the reporting.
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