Jensen Huang, chief executive of Nvidia, said the Chinese military does not rely on his California-based company’s chips. But an analysis of six years of Chinese records shows that the Chinese military has openly sought Nvidia’s artificial intelligence chips since 2019.
Chinese records reviewed by Wirescreen, a software platform that provides information on Chinese companies, showed that the People’s Liberation Army stepped up efforts to acquire artificial intelligence chips, even after the U.S. government restricted semiconductor sales to foreign adversaries, including China.
The records document instances where suppliers agreed to deliver these chips on military terms, but they do not document final delivery. Nonetheless, John Costello, the Wirescreen analyst who wrote the report, said the data showed “directly and irrefutably” that American technology was equipping the Chinese military.
“How many advanced Nvidia chips in the hands of the PLA does the company consider acceptable? » he asked.
The report draws on a broader data set than previously reviewed and shows how China has adapted and attempted to circumvent U.S. technological restrictions in recent years.
Wirescreen reviewed 3,800 procurement files related to chips and high-end computing. It discovered more than 500 cases where various Chinese military units were searching for Nvidia chips, either by name or technical specifications.
The technology was sought by nearly every branch of the Chinese military, including units that work on simulated nuclear explosives, conduct offensive cyberattacks and plan war games.
The report was shared with the Trump administration and Congress, which are debating the future of Nvidia’s sales to China. In December, President Trump, who has become a close ally of Mr. Huang, approved the sale of Nvidia’s second-best chip to China, while demanding a cut of that revenue for the government. But Republican lawmakers, who fear that advanced chips could help China’s military, have introduced legislation that would remove full responsibility for AI chip exports from the White House.
Mr. Huang has fought restrictions on chips and urged lawmakers to allow Nvidia to sell its products in China. He said blocking Nvidia from China, the world’s largest semiconductor market, would cede the market to competing Chinese products that can now do much of what Nvidia chips do. He also dismissed concerns about China’s military use of the chips, calling them overblown.
Advanced AI systems typically run on arrays of 100,000 chips or more, said John Rizzo, an Nvidia spokesman. In Wirescreen’s analysis, the number of chips requested by the Chinese military was considerably lower than this figure, suggesting that Beijing is relying at least to some extent on domestic chipmakers like Huawei as the country seeks to be technologically self-reliant.
Procurement documents also show that the Chinese military is specifically seeking Huawei chips, as Chinese technology improves, Mr. Rizzo said. He called the idea that China’s military relies on a small number of Nvidia chips “stupid” and “false.”
“China has enough domestic chips for all its military applications, with millions in reserve,” Rizzo said in a statement. “Just as it would make no sense for the US military to use Chinese technology, it makes no sense for the Chinese military to depend on US technology. »
But public tenders spanning from 2019 to 2025 show that China’s military has continued to pursue Nvidia chips for more advanced computing applications. They include Nvidia’s A100, A800, H100 and H800 chips, before and after these chips were controlled by the US government.
Administration officials and congressional staff were briefed last week on the report’s findings.
Rep. John Moolenaar of Michigan, Republican chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, said the report showed how China was trying to “smuggle and steal American technology for military purposes.”
Mr. Moolenaar, who recently introduced a bill to restrict China’s access to American technology, said that was why the United States needed export controls “to protect our advantage in the AI race and ensure that we are not arming China.”
Congress is considering several rules that would restrict the sale of advanced technologies abroad. One, introduced last year, the AI OVERWATCH Act, would require the Commerce Department to certify that AI chips would not be used to aid adversaries’ armies and give Congress the power to block chip exports.
In January, the House Foreign Affairs Committee advanced the bill by a vote of 42 to 2. It still must be approved by the full House and Senate, and it is unclear whether the president will sign it.
Industry experts and government officials question whether U.S. technology controls have stunted China’s technological progress or are backfiring by encouraging the Chinese government to develop domestic alternatives.
Trump officials rolled back global restrictions on Nvidia chip sales imposed at the end of the Biden administration, saying they were stifling U.S. technology companies. But the move allowed subsidiaries of Chinese companies outside China to legally buy Nvidia’s most advanced chips, said Chris McGuire, a former State Department official.
On Sunday, the Trump administration issued a clarification of its rules, saying companies must obtain a license from the U.S. government to sell controlled chips to Chinese companies anywhere in the world.
China has also continued to develop its domestic technology. Last week, Huawei unveiled a major breakthrough in its chip development that it said would allow it to make cutting-edge chips within five years. The company is expected to make millions of chips this year, according to SemiAnalysis, a semiconductor research company.
China has regulations that encourage its military to use domestic technology products. Procurement records show the military awarded contracts to Chinese companies that rely on Huawei’s artificial intelligence chips, which were a key selling point, according to an analysis by the Jamestown Foundation, a China-focused policy group.
Mr. Costello said Wirescreen’s analysis showed that U.S. restrictions had slowed China’s purchases of technology, even though the military eventually developed strategies to get around them.
“It introduces a lot of friction, forces them to compromise, slows them down,” he said.
For example, he said, the Jiangnan Institute of Computer Technology, one of the main research institutes of China’s Cyberspace Force, appears to have more difficulty obtaining chips after the United States imposed export controls in 2022 and 2023. Some bids launched by the institute for American AI technology did not pan out and the group had to relist them in another form.
The Chinese Cyberspace Force, which is responsible for cyberwarfare, reconnaissance and domestic surveillance, was the largest buyer among Chinese military service branches of U.S. AI technology in the documents, and the Jiangnan Institute was added to a commercial blacklist in 2019 for developing supercomputers for the Chinese military.
China’s military and associated companies have adapted to U.S. export controls by finding new ways to acquire technology, Mr. Costello said. The military has reduced some of its technical requirements and used new channels to obtain chips that have obscured its role. That meant tapping new types of companies to buy the chips, ranging from established technology companies to shell companies. It took the military about a year to adjust, Mr. Costello said.
A Chinese Embassy spokesperson said China has always advocated cooperation with the United States and opposed the militarization of technological and economic issues.
Procurement records provided clues about how Nvidia’s technology was used. In January 2024, a division of the Beijing-based military cybersecurity unit was looking for four AI servers equipped with Nvidia’s A100 chips. He says the equipment must support a tool called hashcat, used for password cracking.
Mr. Costello said a military unit using AI servers to run hashcat software would most likely use the chips to facilitate intrusion into password-protected accounts, including possibly training an AI system to hack.
It is unclear whether some military entities may have acquired Nvidia chips to try to break them down and understand their vulnerabilities or to replicate the technology.
The report also shows that research institutes linked to China’s military are increasingly gaining remote access to chips by renting them from commercial data centers.
The Wirescreen study builds on an earlier analysis that found the Chinese military was purchasing American chips to support its push toward AI.
Sen. Jim Banks, an Indiana Republican who supports the AI OVERWATCH Act, called the Chinese military’s access to U.S. chips a “national security crisis.”
