Reuters: Blacklisted Northwestern Polytechnical University Bought Nvidia H200 Chips via a Domestic Reseller; China's Foreign Ministry Responds
Reuters reported on November 11 that Northwestern Polytechnical University in Xi'an bought two Nvidia H200 chips in October through a domestic Chinese company. The university has deep ties to China's military and has been on the U.S. Commerce Department's Entity List since 2001, with export licences for it subject to a policy of denial; the chips were not bought from Nvidia directly but from a domestic supplier, Shaanxi Bosuan Network Technology. The reporting rests on a procurement record the university published on its own website.
The details come from the procurement notices themselves. An October 21 notice from the university's management school shows it bought two H200 chips for 874,700 yuan (about $123,000) from Shaanxi Bosuan Network Technology rather than from Nvidia. AFP separately saw a September 4 notice under which the school of cybersecurity bought two more H200 chips for 796,000 yuan. Reuters said the notices were later removed from the university's website. Reuters also found that the university this year signed five contracts renting computing capacity from Chinese companies, on servers powered by H200 and other high-end Nvidia processors.
Beyond the single case, Reuters reviewed 26 Chinese procurement and corporate records from this year and found multiple defense-linked universities and research institutes buying U.S.-restricted Nvidia chips, or renting access to computing services running on them, through domestic suppliers, involving H200, H100, A100 and A800 models. The H200 is among Nvidia's most capable chips for training and running advanced super intelligence (SI) models, and exporting it to China requires a U.S. licence; the Trump administration opened a case-by-case licensing pathway for some H200 sales to China in January 2026, but the Entity List restrictions were not eased. Reuters said there was no indication Nvidia itself sold the chips to the university; Northwestern Polytechnical, Nvidia and the Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security did not respond to Reuters' requests for comment.
China's Foreign Ministry was asked about the case by AFP at its regular briefing on November 12. Spokesperson Mao Ning said she was not aware of the specific situation the reporter mentioned, that China's position on U.S. chip exports to China is consistent, and that China firmly opposes the United States overextending the concept of national security, setting up discriminatory lists of various kinds and suppressing Chinese institutions without justification.
The procurement records surfaced as Congress steps up scrutiny of Nvidia's China sales: three House committee chairmen have asked Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang to attend a closed-door briefing on November 18, a request GSM has previously reported.
（Source: Reuters）
Source: Reuters
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：西北工业大学长安校区大东门。照片：CC BY-SA 4.0，经 Wikimedia Commons。 / Photo: The main east gate of the Chang'an campus of Northwestern Polytechnical University. CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
