Reuters: $3.2B China AI Pipeline Built on Restricted Nvidia GPUs

The scale is the story. A Reuters review of more than 150 Chinese procurement notices, investment plans, construction contracts and corporate disclosures has tallied over 23 billion yuan ($3.2 billion) in AI data-centre projects specifying Nvidia's restricted H100, H200 and H800 processors.

That cuts against Nvidia's own public line. The company has said US export controls have "effectively shut it out of the AI data-centre market in the world's second-biggest economy," yet the same reporting pulls up an IDC estimate it cited in October that put Nvidia at 34% of Chinese AI-accelerator shipments in the first half of 2026. Huang said last year the figure had gone from 95% to zero.

The individual projects are specific. In coastal Fujian, a proposed 6.2 billion yuan ($873 million) AI computing centre in Xianyou county is seeking commercial partners and specifies Nvidia H100 chips. In Shaanxi, state-owned engineering group Sinomach said a subsidiary won a contract tied to a 3 billion yuan computing centre specifying H100 and H200 processors. In Gansu, a local company was awarded a 1.16 billion yuan construction contract in July for a centre that plans to install approximately 3,072 Nvidia processors, with tender documents listing H100 and H200 hardware. In eastern Jiangsu, the Wuxi municipal government said in March 2025 that a computing cluster using Nvidia H800 processors had entered operation.

The paperwork sits in public tender records, and the buyers are not the familiar Chinese big-tech names. They are local governments, a state engineering group, and regional computing hubs stretching from the wealthy coast to remote western provinces.

The piece landed the same day we logged Senator Scott's summons of Huang and Lutnick to Senate Banking and reporting that Trump-Lutnick ties to Huang slowed Nvidia China export curbs.