The US Cleared a Chinese Firm to Assemble Nvidia H200 Servers, and Its Listed Office Is an Empty Shell

Washington approved a Chinese company to assemble Nvidia's H200 chips into AI servers, and when a New York Times reporter went to its listed address in Beijing, the office was a hollow grey shell with wires hanging where the lights should be. The company is called New Matrix, and the Commerce Department cleared it earlier this year.

The Times found little evidence that New Matrix exists inside China. The firm is 17 months old. It is missing from the building directory, the property manager had no record of it, and its website names no staff and no history. Its registered address also moved this fall, from a compound where thousands of firms are registered on paper to the empty industrial park unit.

Owners with a blacklist problem

Corporate records link two of New Matrix's main owners to Wise Road Capital, a private equity fund the US put on the Commerce Department's entity list in 2024 for helping the Chinese government acquire sensitive chip companies. Wise Road's founder, Li Bin, also chairs Tsinghua Unigroup, whose subsidiary New H3C Semiconductor Technologies was added to the same list in 2021 for working with the Chinese military. Two analysts told the Times they think New Matrix may be a front for firms around that fund.

It is the second such case. In September the Times reported that Maginfra, another young company licensed for H200s, had a deserted office too, with a few chairs and empty desks in a locked room. Analysts believe Maginfra is an offshoot of Inspur, the server maker that sits on the entity list. Both appear to have been approved as server assemblers for other customers, not as the final buyers.

A pattern, not a one-off

The Times says other approved companies have similar links. Zhejiang Yindun Cloud Technology runs partly out of a data center owned by a cloud group that serves military contractors, and Shanghai Jiatang grew out of a state-owned chipmaker that supplies the Chinese military. Maginfra, Yindun and Jiatang did not respond to requests for comment.

Liza Tobin, who ran China policy at the White House National Security Council under both Trump and Biden, said she doubts that either the Commerce Department or Nvidia is doing enough due diligence to make sure the license terms are followed.

An approval is not a shipment, and an empty registered office is not proof that chips reached a military user. The H200 business is also small for now. Trump allowed sales in December 2025 with the US government taking a cut, and H200 shipments to China were under 1% of Nvidia's data center revenue in the quarter that ended in July. Beijing has been slow to sign off on purchases while it pushes domestic chips.

The loopholes are wider than one license list. Nvidia has also told cloud providers to cap Chinese customers at 49% on new contracts, a rule its sales teams passed on verbally. Between that and licensed assemblers nobody can find, the question of who is actually getting Nvidia's chips has no clean answer.

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