NYT reports Inspur shipped $5.6bn of US AI servers to China via a renamed subsidiary

The New York Times reported that Inspur Group, a Chinese server maker the US Commerce Department added to its Entity List in March 2023 over its work with the Chinese military, had kept buying advanced American chip technology through a renamed US subsidiary. The company’s California unit, Inspur Systems, became Aivres shortly after the blacklisting — reporters found it operating out of the same offices with largely the same staff — and was never itself placed on the Entity List.

Between April 2024 and February 2026, the Times reported, Aivres exported at least $5.6 billion of advanced US technology to Southeast Asia, including more than $3 billion of servers built around Nvidia’s Blackwell chips, the company’s most powerful AI silicon. Trade records reviewed by the paper and analysed by ImportGenius showed those shipments reaching data centres and technology firms serving some of China’s largest companies, including Alibaba and ByteDance. The Times reported that federal officials had begun examining Aivres’s business, though it was unclear what stage that inquiry had reached; the report did not describe any enforcement action taken against the company.

The case illustrates a gap in US export policy that is distinct from the smuggling prosecutions brought the same year: the chips did not travel directly from the US to a blacklisted Chinese buyer, and no single transaction obviously breached the letter of the rules, which bar direct sales to Entity-Listed firms and bar anyone acting on such a firm’s behalf, but impose few restrictions on a non-listed subsidiary buying hardware and routing it through, or granting remote access via, data centres in third countries. It sits alongside other 2026 findings of a similar pattern — Epoch AI’s trade-data analysis of a separate discrepancy in Malaysia–China server trade, and the Justice Department’s prosecution of a scheme that moved servers through a Southeast Asian shell company — though the Inspur/Aivres arrangement as reported relied on corporate renaming rather than false paperwork or staged inspections.