For years, a sign outside one of Silicon Valley’s many nondescript offices said Inspur, the name of one of China’s most important technology companies.
But in March 2023, the United States added Inspur Group to the so-called entity list, a blacklist with more than 3,000 companies that have been restricted from doing business with the United States because they are considered a security risk.
Not long after, the Inspur sign was changed to Aivres, the name of Inspur’s new U.S. subsidiary. The subsidiary continued with its Chinese parent company’s work, helping it build a thriving global network to provide the computing power that supplies China’s growing artificial intelligence industry.
The Silicon Valley subsidiary, which appears to be taking advantage of several loopholes in U.S. export law, has played a key role in Inspur’s sidestepping of American restrictions. Federal officials have begun looking into the subsidiary’s business, but it is not clear where that inquiry stands, said four officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not allowed to discuss it.
The New York Times examined thousands of shipment records, corporate documents and supply contracts to piece together how Inspur’s network works. Reporters also visited sites in China, Southeast Asia and California, and spoke with more than a dozen current and former officials, tech executives and industry analysts.
The U.S. government prohibits the most advanced chips, like the Blackwell chip from the Silicon Valley giant Nvidia, from being sent to any company in China. And U.S. law bars any company anywhere in the world from buying restricted products made with American technology on behalf of a blacklisted company. But there are few restrictions on companies in China that bar them from remotely gaining access to A.I. data centers in Southeast Asia.
Whether Chinese firms are getting access to cutting-edge technology, particularly high-end computer chips made by Nvidia, has become a hot question in Silicon Valley and Washington, where executives and officials worry that China could use A.I. for hacking, surveillance and military operations.
Chinese A.I. companies are also closing the performance gap on systems made by their American competitors, raising concerns that the Chinese companies are using American technology.
From April 2024 through February 2026, Aivres exported at least $5.6 billion of advanced technology from the United States to Southeast Asia, including more than $3 billion of computers containing cutting-edge Blackwell chips and equipment from Nvidia, according to trade records analyzed by ImportGenius, a data firm, and The Times.
That technology went to data centers and technology firms in Southeast Asia that serve China’s biggest tech firms, including Alibaba and ByteDance, trade records show. Megaspeed, a China-linked company that U.S. officials have been investigating over whether it smuggled restricted chips into China, was among that group of recipients. (One of Megaspeed’s subsidiaries has financial ties with Alibaba, according to Malaysian business documents.)
Other technology went from Inspur’s network of global subsidiaries to an electronics manufacturer in Malaysia, which has been shipping unlabeled but high-priced servers to China, according to trade records drawn mostly from Malaysia and Indonesia. The servers are sent to a new firm, Maginfra, which has supplied high-performance computers to Chinese universities and state-owned firms, according to Chinese contracts and procurement records.
Inspur, Aivres, Maginfra, Alibaba and ByteDance did not respond to requests for comment. Megaspeed did not provide a comment. John Rizzo, a spokesman for Nvidia, said the company did not support “diverted products,” and sold to well-known partners “who work with us to ensure that all sales comply with U.S. export control rules.”
The Trump administration rolled back Biden-era restrictions on remote access by Chinese companies to data centers in other countries, and both the administration and Congress have been weighing new rules to replace them. Nvidia’s Mr. Rizzo said the business brought “tens of billions of dollars and high-paying jobs home.”
The administration has also taken a more cautious approach to placing sanctions on Chinese firms, after attempts last year to expand the entity list drew blowback from China. Inside the Commerce Department, which enforces the list, six current and former officials described an agency that had lost its appetite for cases involving China or Nvidia. Ten months have passed without a firm’s being added to the entity list, the longest stretch in 18 years.
A White House official said the Trump administration had enacted the most rigorous export control regime in modern history and was committed to safeguarding America’s national security.
But Jordan Nanos, an analyst at SemiAnalysis, a tech research firm, who has studied Aivres’s business, said that the firm operated in the United States with the same servers, employees and offices as its parent company, Inspur, and that federal officials seemed to have done little about it.
“Are they trying to ban them, or are they not?” he said.
Different Country, Same Tactic
Most Americans have never heard of Inspur, but the company is among the world’s largest makers of computer servers. It has also dodged one sanction after another.
When the U.S. blacklisted Inspur in 2023, it got a new name in the United States. In China, Inspur got a new address.
The entity list, which the United States uses to block trade to targeted companies, applies to the specific company name and address designated by the government. Just days after its 2023 listing, Inspur registered its main business to a building down the road.
Four months ago, a Times reporter visited that address, in the eastern Chinese city Jinan. It was a nondescript building with no signage beyond a bank on the ground floor. A security guard confirmed that Inspur had an office there, but said not many people worked in it. He said Inspur was really based at the industrial park down the street.
That compound was busy. A series of dark gray high-rises stood inside a vast enclosure ringed by a hedge of roses and rows of motorbikes. Inside the gates, a red sign flashed a key slogan from China’s leader, Xi Jinping: “Chinese dream.”
Inspur, which is majority-owned by Shandong Province, began as a state-owned electronics factory. It developed the world’s first pager capable of displaying Chinese characters. More than a decade ago, the Chinese military and state turned to Inspur’s servers to reduce the reliance on foreign companies.
That made Inspur an American target. In 2020, the Trump administration included it on a list of Chinese military companies. In 2023, the Biden administration said Inspur Group had sought U.S. technology to make military supercomputers and put it on the entity list. That meant U.S. firms could no longer ship to it without a special license.
A loophole quickly opened. Companies like Intel had been selling to Inspur’s subsidiary, not the parent company, which the order did not cover.
Two years later, the second Trump administration closed a part of the loophole, adding some of Inspur’s subsidiaries to the blacklist. Aivres was not among them.
The Standout Connection
Records show that billions of dollars of advanced servers and other technology have flowed from Aivres and Inspur’s other global subsidiaries to cloud-computing and assembly firms across Southeast Asia.
One connection stands out. Maginfra was created in China last year, and quickly began doing brisk business with a Malaysian electronics firm that transacts with Inspur’s companies in Hong Kong, mainland China, the United States and Singapore.
Maginfra imported more than $700 million of servers from Malaysia into China in a six-month period, including more than 1,500 servers that were priced consistently with high-end A.I. capabilities, ImportGenius data shows. These entries do not include detailed descriptions of the servers or chips inside them, but they do indicate per-unit prices.
Maginfra has a scant public profile and no direct link to Inspur on paper. It is also government-owned, and it is down the street from Inspur’s headquarters. Corporate records show that the legal representative of Maginfra’s parent company has held positions at companies affiliated with Inspur subsidiaries or investment partners.
According to Wirescreen, a data platform, many of the patents that Maginfra has registered were filed by inventors who have worked for Inspur. The two firms’ websites also share striking similarities.
When a reporter from The Times visited Maginfra’s listed address in China on Tuesday, it appeared deserted. A few chairs and empty desks sat inside a small locked room with no signs. Workers on the floor said they had not seen anyone use the office, and building receptionists said they had not heard of Maginfra.
Public filings analyzed by C4ADS, a Washington research nonprofit, show Chinese universities, some with ties to defense research, seeking and sometimes obtaining servers containing advanced computer chips built by Maginfra and Inspur.
Maginfra also inked a contract in November to sell $165 million of high-performance computing technology to a division of a Chinese state-owned bank, according to a filing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
“It’s very hard to look at this and not see a state-sponsored Chinese network for bypassing export controls,” said William George, the director of research at ImportGenius, who analyzed the trade records.
But the Trump administration approved Maginfra this year for a license for Nvidia’s less powerful H200 chips, according to documents viewed by The Times. Reuters previously reported the license.
The subsidiary Aivres remains very visible in Silicon Valley. It advertised A.I. servers using AMD’s technology and was listed as an “elite” partner of Nvidia and a sponsor of its annual conference in San Jose, Calif. (AMD declined to comment.)
In May, Nvidia announced that Aivres was among the more than two dozen companies in full-scale production of the servers that would supply its next generation of A.I. technology.
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