A Chinese server maker blacklisted by Washington appears to have kept buying top-end Nvidia AI hardware by operating under a US subsidiary name, which is bad news for American export controls and for Nvidia's regulatory standing.

• Inspur was blacklisted in 2023 over ties to China's military, but its Silicon Valley office simply swapped the sign for "Aivres," a subsidiary that was never on the list.
• Aivres shipped billions of dollars of advanced tech from the US to Southeast Asia, including several billion in machines running Nvidia's newest Blackwell chips.
• The gear flowed to data centers and cloud firms in the region, some of which serve Alibaba and ByteDance.
• A second route runs through Maginfra, a state-backed Chinese company sitting near Inspur's headquarters, which imported huge volumes of servers from Malaysia and sold high-performance computing to a state bank.
• Chinese universities doing defense research have sought or received servers with these advanced chips inside.

Outlook: Federal investigators are looking at Aivres, and pressure will grow to close the subsidiary and third-country loopholes in US chip rules.