Nvidia’s Powerful B300 Chips Spotted on Chinese State-Owned Network

Israeli security firm Lava said it found 32 Nvidia Blackwell Ultra B300 chips through monitoring systems linked to the network of China Telecom, a state-owned telecommunications company. The B300 is one of Nvidia’s most powerful data-center chips and is barred from being sold to China by U.S. export controls. The finding raises questions about how effective those restrictions are in keeping advanced AI chips out of China.

Lava said it spotted the chips through Nvidia’s DCGM Exporter, an open-source tool that data-center operators install on their own servers to monitor GPU health and performance. The tool is designed for internal use, but some operators could leave it open on the internet without a password, exposing chip models and unique hardware identifiers. Lava said internet addresses alone cannot confirm where the chips physically sit, and its research did not determine how they reached the network.

The findings show how much Nvidia’s own tools can reveal where its chips are running. Nvidia said in December it had built optional software that can estimate in which country its chips operate, but the company has not yet released it.

“With tens of millions of GPUs in service in approved countries, this report again demonstrates that smuggling is a nonfactor, blocked by governments on both sides of the globe,” an Nvidia spokesperson said. China Telecom did not respond to a request for comment.

The discovery comes as Chinese AI developers hunt for computing power to build more advanced models despite U.S. restrictions on chip supplies. For example, Moonshot AI was seeking more Blackwell chips to train its next model, The Information reported.