# Inspur Used Its Aivres Shell to Send $5.6 Billion in Nvidia Chips to China > Source: > Published: 2026-09-22 11:43:51+00:00 *A company Washington blacklisted in 2023 never actually left the U.S. chip supply chain. It just changed its name.* Inspur Group landed on the Commerce Department's Entity List in March 2023, cut off from American technology over national security concerns tied to its work with China's military. Its California subsidiary did not land on that list. Renamed Aivres, the unit kept operating out of the same offices with largely the same staff, and according to a New York Times investigation published September 6, it exported at least $5.6 billion in advanced technology to Southeast Asia between April 2024 and February 2026. More than $3 billion of that was servers built around Nvidia's Blackwell chips, the most powerful AI silicon Nvidia sells. The Wall Street Journal had already flagged part of this story last November, reporting that some Blackwell-equipped servers landed in Southeast Asia and were then diverted onward into China. The Times investigation adds the missing piece: who was on the other end. Chinese customers including ByteDance and Alibaba ultimately received hardware that traced back to Aivres, according to the paper's reporting. Here's the mechanism, and it isn't complicated. An Entity List designation blocks a named company from buying controlled U.S. technology. It doesn't automatically reach that company's subsidiaries unless regulators add them separately, and nobody added Aivres. So a firm barred outright from Nvidia's most advanced chips can still get them, as long as the purchase order runs through a legally separate American entity with a different name on the door and an address regulators already know. That's not a hypothetical weakness in the rule. It's exactly what happened, for nearly two years, in dollar figures large enough to move a balance sheet. [Apple Opens Claims Site For iPhone Owners In Its $250 Million Siri Settlement](https://startupfortune.com/apple-opens-claims-site-for-iphone-owners-in-its-250-million-siri-settlement/) Apple's $250 million Siri settlement claims website opened on September 21, 2026, letting eligible iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 16 owners file for payouts between $25 and $95 per device. The deadline to file is December 21, 2026, though payments won't go out until after a February 2027 court hearing. - [how to claim Apple Siri settlement payout](https://startupfortune.com/apple-opens-claims-site-for-iphone-owners-in-its-250-million-siri-settlement/) - [iPhone 15 Pro 16 owners eligible settlement money](https://startupfortune.com/apple-opens-claims-site-for-iphone-owners-in-its-250-million-siri-settlement/) Federal officials have opened an inquiry into Aivres, according to the Times, which cited four officials who described the investigation on condition of anonymity. Where that inquiry actually stands right now is unclear. No charges. No public findings. Just a review sitting somewhere inside the machinery of an administration that has spent three years building an export-control regime around exactly this kind of workaround, only to watch a blacklisted company route billions of dollars through a subsidiary it never bothered to add to the list. The timing is what turns this from a compliance story into a diplomatic one. Presidents Trump and Xi are set to meet in Washington on September 24 for a summit both governments have described as centered on trade, Taiwan, and a first formal AI dialogue between the two countries. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has said export controls specifically are being handled through a separate channel and are not on the summit's official agenda. That's a strange thing to say the same week a major investigation shows the control regime has a hole in it big enough to move $5.6 billion through. You can keep export controls off the formal agenda. You can't keep a $3 billion Blackwell leak out of the room where the two governments are supposed to be building trust on AI. Nvidia has spent much of 2026 publicly stating that it complies fully with U.S. export law, and that once a legitimate sale closes, the chips are out of its hands. That's true as far as it goes, and it's also beside the point. The vulnerability here isn't in Nvidia's compliance. It's in a blacklist that names companies instead of ownership structures, built for a world where a sanctioned firm doesn't simply rename its U.S. office and keep the lights on. This isn't the first time a subsidiary structure has been used to route around a blacklist, and it won't be the last as long as the Entity List works this way. What makes the Aivres case different is the scale and the paper trail: two years of trade records, a specific dollar figure, and named end customers in ByteDance and Alibaba rather than a vague suspicion. Regulators built a wall around Inspur. Aivres walked around it through a door labeled with a different company's name, in the same building, with the same people inside. Whether the federal inquiry into Aivres produces anything before the Trump-Xi summit, or after it, or ever, is still an open question. For now, the chips have already shipped. **Also read:** [Twenty Countries Propose a Global AI Watchdog While Washington Stays Silent](https://startupfortune.com/twenty-countries-propose-a-global-ai-watchdog-while-washington-stays-silent/) • [Vaynhanh Research Puts Vietnam's Fast Loan Market at Around VND 1,100 Trillion](https://startupfortune.com/vaynhanh-research-puts-vietnams-fast-loan-market-at-around-vnd-1100-trillion/) • [Ten GPT API Providers Compared As GPT-6 And GPT Image 2.5 Reshape The Market](https://startupfortune.com/ten-gpt-api-providers-compared-as-gpt-6-and-gpt-image-25-reshape-the-market/) [OpenAI Shuts Down Sora's API This Week, Ending Its Billion Dollar Disney Deal](https://startupfortune.com/openai-shuts-down-soras-api-this-week-ending-its-billion-dollar-disney-deal/) OpenAI's Sora video API shuts down for good on September 24, 2026, just days after the news broke. The shutdown, which reportedly saved OpenAI roughly $1 million a day in compute costs, also killed a $1 billion Disney licensing deal that let Sora users generate clips with Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars characters. - [why is OpenAI shutting down Sora API](https://startupfortune.com/openai-shuts-down-soras-api-this-week-ending-its-billion-dollar-disney-deal/) - [what happened to OpenAI Sora video generator](https://startupfortune.com/openai-shuts-down-soras-api-this-week-ending-its-billion-dollar-disney-deal/) *This article is posted in [Technology News](https://startupfortune.com/category/technology/), check it out for more related stories.* ## Join the discussion [Open in the community →](https://startupfortune.com/community/) Almost there. Sign in and your reply posts straight away.