Nvidia’s Chip Loophole Is Now a Summit Issue

When President Xi visits the White House on September 24, one topic will be whether Washington keeps letting Southeast Asian data centers give Chinese firms cloud access to computing power from Nvidia’s top GPUs. Asia Times

The trigger was a New York Times investigation. It found that Aivres, a California server maker, exported at least $5.6 billion in advanced technology to Southeast Asia between April 2024 and February 2026, including more than $3 billion in servers with Nvidia’s Blackwell chips, ultimately serving customers like ByteDance and Alibaba. Aivres is Inspur’s US arm. Inspur is on the Entity List but Aivres isn’t, and Inspur reportedly held only a 33% stake, below the 50% threshold of the affiliates rule. Nvidia says it doesn’t support product diversion. Nvidia chip export loophole clouds US-China AI summit talks – Asia Times +2

Renting servers abroad is legal because of how the rules are built. One policy researcher explained that the regime controls physical chips and doesn’t cover remote access to them. CNBC

Congress is trying to close that gap. The Remote Access Security Act would extend export controls to remote access through cloud services; the House passed it 369 to 22 in January, but it still needs the Senate. The Chip Security Act, aimed at smuggling and diversion, cleared the House Foreign Affairs Committee in March. Asia TimesAsia Times

The Commerce Department has tightened things too. Its May guidance requires licenses for advanced chip sales to any company whose ultimate parent is in an arms-embargoed country, even if the company sits elsewhere. Asia Times

Watch whether any of this shows up in what the two leaders say after the summit.

Sources: Asia Times (asiatimes.com), CNBC (cnbc.com), Al Jazeera (aljazeera.com), New York Times reporting as cited by Asia Times