Two little-known Chinese companies that received U.S. approval to buy Nvidia AI chips operate out of empty offices at unknown addresses, raising questions about how the Commerce Department vets export license applications. Tom's Hardware reported that the offices of New Matrix and Maginfra were deserted shells containing only some office furniture, and that people working nearby said they had never heard of either firm or seen anyone enter the spaces. The finding has fueled concerns that Washington is approving GPU export licenses without close scrutiny of possible links to Beijing.
Liza Tobin, a former China director for the White House National Security Council, told the publication she has extensive concerns that neither the Commerce Department nor Nvidia is performing the due diligence required to ensure licensing terms are followed.
The approved buyers include large, well-known Chinese firms such as Baidu, BYD, Tesla Shanghai, ZTE, Alibaba, Tencent and ByteDance. ZTE has previously been blacklisted from the U.S. market. New Matrix and Maginfra, by contrast, are relatively unknown, and the report states that neither is listed as the final user of the Nvidia chips. Instead, they are supposed to assemble the chips into AI servers that would be forwarded to a final user, though who their customers are remains unclear.
Public records show New Matrix was founded by Li Bin, who along with two other primary owners is connected to Wise Road, a Chinese private equity firm sanctioned by the U.S. for helping Beijing acquire sensitive chip technologies. Li chairs Tsinghua Unigroup, a technology conglomerate partly owned by the Chinese government, and owns New H3C Semiconductor Technologies, which has been added to the Commerce Department's Entity List for cooperating with the Chinese military. New Matrix's website reportedly contains no information about its owners or history.
Maginfra is suspected of ties to Inspur, which Washington has blacklisted since 2023 for supporting the People's Liberation Army. The two companies share personnel, patents and a similar government ownership structure, according to the report.
A separate license holder, Zhejiang Yindun Cloud Technology, also drew scrutiny. Its executives are reportedly related to the founder of Range Intelligent Computing Technology Group, a data center operator that has sold compute capacity to Chinese military contractors, and the company is reportedly partly operating out of a Range data center.
President Donald Trump banned exports of Nvidia AI GPUs in April 2025, including chips customized to meet the performance ceiling Washington set for AI processors. He reversed the decision late last year in exchange for a 25% cut of the sale, but the first H200 shipments took more than eight months to reach China, in part because Beijing declined to clear Chinese tech companies to buy the chips for the first several months of the year. After China lifted its import ban, several Chinese companies applied for licenses, and The New York Times reported that around two dozen firms have received approval, including the questionable ones identified here.
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