NYT: Inspur's Unlisted US Arm Aivres Shipped $3B of Blackwell Servers via Southeast Asia

The parent has been on the US Entity List since 2023. Its renamed California subsidiary kept buying Nvidia's best chips anyway. Export controls, meet a new business license.

Three key facts

The New York Times reported on September 6 that Aivres exported at least $5.6 billion of advanced computing gear to Southeast Asia between April 2024 and February 2026, more than $3 billion of it servers built on Nvidia Blackwell chips. According to the report, end customers included ByteDance and Alibaba. Reporters combed through thousands of shipping records, filings and supply contracts, and visited sites in China, Southeast Asia and California.

Aivres is Inspur Group's California arm, renamed after Inspur was blacklisted in 2023, with largely the same offices and staff. Aivres itself is not on the list. The Wall Street Journal previously reported that Inspur holds about 33% of Aivres, below the 50% threshold that triggers automatic restrictions.

The Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security issued guidance in May requiring licenses for advanced computing sales to firms whose ultimate parent sits in an arms-embargoed country. Nvidia said it does not support product diversion and sells only to well-known partners that work with it on compliance.

WangDou's Take

The most absurd number here is 33%. A control regime meant to choke off frontier compute draws its line at majority ownership, so you own a third and let the same building and the same staff handle the rest. Three billion dollars of Blackwell is well over a thousand full server systems, not a few GPUs in a suitcase. It sat on customs paperwork for years. Nvidia's line that it "does not support diversion" is technically perfect: it didn't divert anything, it just sold to an American company. Export policy is forever chasing corporate structure, and a rename takes weeks while a rule change takes years.

Source: Asia Times · Inside AI News