China Keeps Making End Runs Around America’s Chip Export Controls: REPORT

A top Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) lab accessed Nvidia’s most advanced AI chips this summer, showcasing the country’s reliance on American hardware despite U.S. export restrictions, Bloomberg News reported on Monday.

Moonshot AI, a leading Chinese AI lab, signed a contract in August to rent nearly three dozen servers equipped with Nvidia’s most powerful AI chips, according to documents reviewed by Bloomberg News. Chinese AI labs continue to access top American hardware as Congress looks to tighten Chinese access to these chips.

Documents filed with Chinese regulators said Moonshot rented Super Micro Computer servers through Lingmeixin, or Beijing Technology Co., and the servers are valued at roughly $65 million, or 432 million Chinese Yuan, which could indicate a possible breach of U.S. rules that bar sales to China without a license, the outlet noted. Moonshot disputed the accuracy of the documents viewed by Bloomberg, and the outlet was unable to confirm if the company obtained the license.

Lingmeixin sells products made by DJI, one of the world’s leading makers of consumer and commercial drones, per MIT Review. The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Security and Industry (BIS) added DJI to the government’s economic blacklist, or Entity List in 2020, per Reuters.

Lingmeixin did not immediately respond to a Daily Caller News Foundation comment request.

The documents no longer referenced Moonshot AI after the outlet contacted the company.

“We currently have no business relationship with Lingmeixin. We neither participated in nor authorized the related financing or guarantee arrangements, and had no knowledge of them,” a spokesperson for Moonshot AI told the DCNF in a statement.

“These appear to be the SuperMicro servers from previous cases, already being addressed by the authorities. NVIDIA continues its commitment to working with all relevant authorities to assist them in enforcing applicable laws and policies in cases like these,” an Nvidia spokesperson told the DCNF in a written statement.

“Supermicro does not conduct business with these entities. We maintain a robust compliance program, we are committed to complying with all applicable U.S. export and re-export control laws and regulations, and we require our distributors and resellers to do the same. We also continue to work closely with industry partners to combat the shared challenge of diversion and help protect American innovation,” a spokesperson for Super Micro told the DCNF in a statement.

The Trump administration approved the sale of AI chips to dozens of Chinese companies, many of whose offices were found to be empty, and others had connections to firms sanctioned for national security risks, the New York Times reported Sunday.

Moonshot looked to lease 8,000 Nvidia chips-worth of computing power from European data centers, CNBC reported in early November. American export controls effectively ban Chinese access to Nvidia chips without a license, according to Commerce Department rules.

However, foreign cloud services are not regulated by these export rules, which could allow China to circumvent the Commerce Department’s export control regime, according to CNBC.

Nvidia has launched an independent investigation into reports that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang had an affair with an AI executive identified as a Chinese spy. Huang admitted to the affair with Megaspeed International founder Alice Huang and the Nvidia Board of Directors said it has no reason to believe national security or Nvidia secrets were compromised, per the company’s statement.

Megaspeed International, a Singapore-based cloud computing company, was the largest buyer of Nvidia chips in Southeast Asia, which serves as an important route for transporting chips into China, according to Bloomberg News. The company has denied any wrongdoing.

Indiana Republican Sen. Jim Banks and Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren said that the latest Nvidia reports underscore the need for Congress to off Chinese access to advanced AI chips through the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a must-pass defense bill.

“It is time for Congress to take decisive action to pass key bills like the AI Overwatch Act in the NDAA that will cut off the various pathways through which China accesses advanced chips,” Banks and Warren said in a joint statement, per a press release.

The AI Overwatch Act would require that Commerce Department certify that the end user of advanced AI chips will not benefit the military, intelligence, surveillance capabilities of America’s adversaries, per a press release from Warren’s office.

Banks in July announced that the legislation was included in the Senate version of the NDAA, although lawmakers continue to work on a finalized version of the bill that could pass through both chambers, per a press release from Banks’s office.

China has sought to make itself more self-reliant on its own AI hardware despite its continued use of Nvidia chips.

“We cannot accept a destiny where we cannot control our fate being determined by others in terms of willingness to sell chips to China or not,” Huawei executive Eric Xu in September said about the company’s desire to help China reduce reliance on foreign chips, according to Reuters.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping has pushed for “self-reliance” and an “autonomously controllable” AI hardware and software ecosystem during an April 2025 Politburo meeting on AI, according to the RAND Corporation.

Despite this goal, “China’s chip production capacity remains low and is likely to remain much lower than the U.S. led ecosystem for the foreseeable future,” Ryan Fedasiuk, a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation (FAI) told the DCNF in September.

Chinese AI labs often keep pace with the best American AI companies, although they face accusations of using American AI to improve their models.

Moonshot has frequently released that rival top American AI labs’ capabilities. Moonshot’s latest model, Kimi 3.1 Pro, ranked fourth on the Artificial Intelligence Index in agentic performance, per Artificial Analysis. AI agents can autonomously carry out tasks on behalf of the user, according

“Legitimate AI distillation used to create smaller, more efficient models plays a vital role in this open innovation ecosystem. However, large-scale, covert industrial distillation aimed at stealing proprietary U.S. technology and undermining American research is unacceptable,” Michael Krastios, the White House director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), wrote on X in July as he accused Moonshot of using Anthropic’s data to increase its own AI model’s performance, through a process known as “distilling.”

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