Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, has said that the Chinese military does not depend on chips from his California-based company. But an analysis of six years of Chinese records shows that the Chinese military has been openly seeking 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 has stepped up its efforts to acquire artificial intelligence chips, even after the US government restricted sales of semiconductors to foreign adversaries, including China.
The records document cases in which suppliers agreed to deliver those chips under military terms, but do not document final delivery. However, 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 much of advanced Nvidia chips in PLA’s hands does the company consider acceptable?” asked.
The report draws on a broader data set than previously examined and shows how China has adapted and attempted to circumvent US technology restrictions in recent years.
Wirescreen examined 3,800 procurement records related to chips and high-end computing. It discovered more than 500 cases in which various Chinese military units were searching for Nvidia chips either by name or technical specifications.
The technology was sought by nearly all branches of the Chinese military, including units working on nuclear explosives simulations, carrying out offensive cyber attacks and planning 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 Huang, approved the sale of Nvidia’s second-best chip to China, while demanding a cut in that revenue for the government. But Republican lawmakers concerned that advanced chips could help the Chinese military have introduced legislation that would strip the White House of sole responsibility for AI chip exports.
Huang has fought chip restrictions and urged lawmakers to allow Nvidia to sell to China. He has said that blocking Nvidia in China, the world’s largest semiconductor market, would hand the market over to rival Chinese products that can now do much of what Nvidia’s chips do. He has also dismissed concerns about China’s military use of the chips as overblown.
Advanced AI systems typically operate on networks of 100,000 chips or more, said Nvidia spokesman John Rizzo. In Wirescreen’s analysis, the number of chips ordered by the Chinese military was considerably lower, suggesting Beijing is at least somewhat reliant on domestic chipmakers like Huawei as the country seeks to become technologically self-sufficient.
Procurement documents have also shown that the Chinese military is specifically seeking Huawei chips as Chinese technology improves, Rizzo said. He called the idea that the Chinese military relied on a small number of Nvidia chips “silly” and “false.”
“China has more than enough domestic chips for all of its military applications, with millions to spare,” Rizzo said in a statement. “Just as it would make no sense for the US military to use Chinese technology, it also makes no sense for the Chinese military to rely on US technology.”
But public bidding documents stretching from 2019 to 2025 show that the Chinese military continued to seek Nvidia chips for more advanced computing applications. They include Nvidia’s A100, A800, H100 and H800 chips, both before and after those 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.”
Moolenaar, who recently introduced a bill to restrict China’s access to American technology, said this was why the United States needed export controls “to protect our advantage in the AI race and make sure we are not arming China.”
Congress is weighing several rules that would restrict foreign sales of advanced technology. 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’ militaries and would give Congress the power to block chip exports.
In January, the House Foreign Affairs Committee approved the bill in a 42-2 vote. It still needs to be approved by the full House and Senate, and it is unclear whether the president would sign it.
Industry experts and government officials have debated whether U.S. technology controls have slowed China’s technological progress or are counterproductive by encouraging the Chinese government to develop domestic alternatives.
Trump officials lifted global restrictions on sales of Nvidia chips issued at the end of the Biden administration, saying they were stifling American technology companies. But the move made it possible for subsidiaries of Chinese companies located 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 that companies had to obtain a license from the US 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 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 homegrown technological products. Procurement records show that the military has 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.
Costello said Wirescreen’s analysis showed that US restrictions had slowed technology purchases from China, although the military eventually developed strategies to avoid them.
“This introduces a lot of friction, makes them compromise and slows them down,” he said.
For example, he said, the Jiangnan Institute of Information Technology, one of the main research institutes of China’s Cyberspace Force, appeared to have more trouble obtaining chips after the United States imposed export controls in 2022 and 2023. Some bids the institute submitted for American artificial intelligence technology were not completed and the group had to re-market them in another form.
The China Cyberspace Force, responsible for cyber warfare, reconnaissance and domestic surveillance, was the largest single buyer among branches of the Chinese military service of American artificial intelligence technology in the documents, and the Jiangnan Institute was added to a trade blacklist in 2019 for developing supercomputers for the Chinese military.
The Chinese military and companies associated with it adapted to U.S. export controls by finding new ways to acquire the technology, Costello said. The military reduced some of its technical requirements and used new channels to obtain chips that obfuscated its role. That included bringing in new types of companies to buy the chips, ranging from established technology companies to shell companies. It took the military about a year to adapt, Costello said.
A Chinese embassy spokesman said China had consistently advocated cooperation with the United States and had opposed weaponizing technological and economic issues.
Acquisition records provided some clues about how Nvidia’s technology was used. In January 2024, a division of the military’s Beijing-based cybersecurity unit searched for four artificial intelligence servers equipped with Nvidia’s A100 chips. He specified that the team needed to support a tool called hashcat, which is used to crack passwords.
Costello said a military unit that uses AI servers to run hashcat software would likely use the chips to facilitate access to password-protected accounts, including potentially training an AI system to perform hacking.
It is unclear whether some military entities may have been acquiring Nvidia chips to try to break them down and understand their vulnerabilities or replicate the technology.
The report also documents that research institutes linked to the Chinese military increasingly gained remote access to chips by renting them in commercial data centers.
Wirescreen’s investigation builds on earlier analysis that found China’s military was purchasing American chips to support its push into 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.”
