Nvidia H200 chips are facing questions over export screening. On November 7, 2026, The Verge reported, citing a New York Times investigation, that the U.S. government is approving sales of Nvidia H200 AI chips to Chinese companies linked to blacklisted firms — and that one of the approved buyers has an empty office. The report says this is not an isolated lapse but a pattern, pointing to possible gaps in due diligence at the U.S. Department of Commerce and at Nvidia.
An empty office, and a blacklisted shareholder
One of the approved companies named in the report is New Matrix. A visit by reporters found its office empty, with wires dangling from the ceiling where lights should be. The company is not listed in its building's directory, and staff at the nearby industrial park said they had no record of it. Founded only about 17 months ago, it has almost no online footprint. Its owner is linked to a Chinese private equity firm that has been on a U.S. blacklist since 2024. The investigation says such approvals are not isolated: companies linked to entities subject to national-security trade restrictions keep receiving permission to buy Nvidia chips.
The controls remain, but the screening looks loose
The H200 is Nvidia's flagship chip for AI training and inference, and a central target of U.S. chip controls on China. Under the Biden administration, the United States restricted Nvidia from selling such chips to China; the Trump administration later eased the restrictions on condition that Nvidia hand 15% of the relevant China sales to the U.S. government. Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang had lobbied intensively for the change. While the policy was loosened, the standards for vetting buyers do not appear to have kept pace — the contradiction at the heart of the investigation.
The immediate impact falls in two places. First, the credibility of the Commerce Department's export screening: if a company without even an office can pass approval, the real force of the blacklist is open to question. Second, Nvidia's own compliance risk: once chips pass through an affiliated buyer, tracing them onward to a restricted entity becomes very hard. One distinction matters, though: what the investigation has established so far is approval to buy, not that chips have already reached a blacklisted entity. Overall, U.S. enforcement and scrutiny of AI are still tightening: the U.S. Department of Justice set up a superintelligence task force this month, focused on AI fraud and foreign misuse. The gaps flagged in export screening stand in contrast to that tightening trend.
What to watch next is twofold: whether the Commerce Department reviews these licenses and tightens approval standards for affiliated companies, and whether Nvidia responds on its own customer-screening process. The New York Times investigation is still developing, and statements from the department and Nvidia will decide whether this stays a case-level question or becomes a broader re-examination of how export controls are enforced.
