New York Times reveals: Chinese company Inspur Group circumvents U.S. chip export controls through subsidiaries

The New York Times revealed that after Chinese server giant Inspur was placed on the Entity List by the United States in 2023, its Silicon Valley base soon changed its "Inspur" sign to its American subsidiary Aivres, which continues to obtain and transport advanced American technology equipment through the Southeast Asian supply network. From April 2024 to February 2026, Aivres exported at least US$5.6 billion (approximately NT$177 billion) of advanced technology products from the United States to Southeast Asia, of which more than US$3 billion (approximately NT$94.8 billion) involved computers equipped with Huida's cutting-edge Blackwell chips and other equipment.

In March 2023, the U.S. government placed Inspur Group on the entity list on the grounds that Inspur was involved in Chinese military business, restricting U.S. companies from supplying U.S. technology to it. However, the New York Times discovered that shortly after Inspur was sanctioned, the sign of its Silicon Valley office changed from Inspur to Aivres; since Aivres was not included in the blacklist, it continued to assist Inspur in establishing a global network that supplies computing power to China's AI industry.

The New York Times reviewed thousands of shipping records, corporate documents and supply contracts, and visited China, Southeast Asia and California and found that Aivres appeared to have exploited multiple loopholes in U.S. export regulations and became an important part of Inspur's efforts to circumvent restrictions. U.S. federal officials have begun investigating Aivres' business, but the progress of the investigation is currently unclear.

Trade data shows that relevant advanced equipment flows to Southeast Asian data centers and technology companies, some of which provide cloud computing services to Chinese technology giants such as Alibaba and ByteDance. Another supply chain points to the Chinese company Maginfra, which imported more than US$700 million in servers from Malaysia in just six months, of which more than 1,500 units were priced in line with high-end AI equipment. Although Maginfra has no direct relationship with Inspur on the surface, it has a state-owned background, its address is near Inspur's headquarters, and many patent inventors have also worked for Inspur.

The New York Times investigation also found that some Chinese universities, including some involved in defense research, had sought or obtained servers built by Maginfra and Inspur that contained advanced chips. Maginfra signed another $165 million contract in November last year to sell high-performance computing technology to a unit of a state-owned Chinese bank. William George, director of research at ImportGenius, said the signs were reminiscent of a network backed by Chinese state power and used to circumvent export controls.

In response to the investigation, Inspur, Aivres, Maginfra, Alibaba and ByteDance did not respond to The New York Times' request for comment, and Megaspeed also did not provide comment. Huida spokesman John Rizzo said the company does not support the diversion of products. Huida sells products to well-known partners and works with partners to ensure that all sales comply with U.S. export control regulations.

Aivres is still active in Silicon Valley. It not only sells AI servers using AMD technology, but has also been listed as an "elite" partner of Huida. In May of this year, Huida even announced that Aivres was one of more than 20 companies that has invested in full-scale mass production of next-generation AI technology servers. AMD declined to comment when asked about the situation by The New York Times.