Israeli Firm Detects Restricted Nvidia Processors Inside China Telecom Network
Lava used Nvidia's own monitoring software to find the chips but could not locate where in China Telecom's network they sit.
By Adewale Fletcher ·
Israeli security company Lava says it has identified 32 Nvidia Blackwell Ultra B300 processors running inside China Telecom's network, a finding reported by The Information that puts fresh attention on how chips barred from China by U.S. export controls reached a data center operated by the state-owned telecommunications provider. The B300, which Nvidia announced in March 2025, carries 50% more memory and FP4 compute than the earlier B200 and began shipping by the end of that year.
Lava found the processors through Nvidia's DCGM Exporter, software data center operators install to watch server health and performance. That tool is meant for internal use, but it can often be reached from outside a data center's network and does not always require a password. Lava has not located where in China Telecom's network the chips sit, and how they reached China Telecom remains unknown.
Current U.S. rules let chips of this class be sold only to whitelisted buyers who agree not to pass them to sanctioned parties, including those in China. Enforcement has proved difficult: a 2025 report said Chinese companies smuggled in $1 billion worth of Nvidia AI chips over three months, with B200 processors the most sought after at that time. In August 2026, nine people were indicted in Taiwan over the illegal export of B300 GPUs to China, days after Supermicro confirmed it had fired several employees following an investigation into smuggling. That scheme involved Flying Tiget Tech, a Taiwanese server trading firm that held whitelisted status for GPU purchases.
Nvidia did not dispute Lava's findings. A spokesperson told Tom's Hardware that governments, researchers and media have found "insignificant diversion of controlled US products, less than one half of one percent in recent court cases, a drop in the bucket compared to the ocean of domestic compute China already has." The spokesperson said that with tens of millions of GPUs in service in approved countries, the report "demonstrates that smuggling is a nonfactor, blocked by governments on both sides of the globe." Nvidia has said it is developing software that would let it locate its chips; that tool has not been released.
Prices for Nvidia hardware have climbed amid the demand. Servers built around the five-year-old A100 have tripled in price, and some buyers have turned to retooling gaming GPUs to run AI workloads as smuggling crackdowns continue.
