- IA chips repair companies in China are thriving due to the increase in demand.
- Smuggling gpus an booming underground repair market amid US export restrictions
- Chinese stores simulate data centers and fix hundreds of chips monthly scale
A quiet but growing business has emerged in China that focuses on repairing NVIDIA advanced chips, despite the strict export controls of the United States.
Reports of PakGazette Found around a dozen small businesses, mainly based in Shenzhen, claiming that they serve large amounts of GPU H100 and A100 of NVIDIA, despite the fact that these chips were officially banned from the sale to China in 2022.
A company told the news agency that it repairs up to 500 NVIDIA chips every month, and with approximately 12 similar companies that operate throughout the year, that could be tens of thousands of chips annually.
Significant demand
Many of these units are worn from intensive use, especially because some have run 24 hours for years in AI training workloads.
“There is a really significant repair demand” PakGazette He was said by the co -owner of a Shenzhen firm who moved to the AI hardware at the end of 2024.
That demand led to the creation of a second company only to handle the repair of AI chips.
Its installation includes a server room that can simulate data center conditions with up to 256 servers.
Another store that changed GPU rentals to counted repairs PakGazette Around 200 chips per month is set, it usually charges about 10% of the original purchase price.
Repairs may include fan replacement, circuit plate corrections, memory diagnosis and software tests.
Nvidia cannot legally support or replace the restricted GPUs within China. A Nvidia spokesman said that only the company and the approved partners are authorized to offer the necessary service and support, and added that executing restricted chips without complete infrastructure is not viable in the long term.
The potentially high fault rate raises concerns about what will happen with tens of thousands of older people and previous GPUs once they fail.
The existence of such repair sector is due to generalized smuggling of prohibited chips in China, something we have previously reported.
While NVIDIA recently began offering the H20 GPU in China to comply with export restrictions, many customers there prefer forbidden H100 to train LLMS.
