The Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security is reviewing how Chinese AI companies reach Nvidia hardware they cannot legally buy, including by renting computing capacity inside data centers in third countries, an arrangement that current export rules do not clearly cover.
The agency's enforcement arm is assembling two lists, according to Bloomberg, which reported the review on August 7. One covers countries whose black markets move restricted Nvidia chips physically into China. The other covers countries where Chinese firms reach the same chips remotely, over a network connection, with the hardware never moving.
Only the first list describes conduct that is clearly illegal today. US export controls regulate the movement of goods across borders, and the bureau has not historically treated remote use of a controlled item as an export. A Chinese lab that rents time on processors sitting in a rack in Southeast Asia breaks no rule on the books.
The review follows a run of results from Chinese labs. Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 posted near-frontier scores against systems from OpenAI and Anthropic in July. Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, then accused Moonshot of obtaining servers containing Nvidia's GB300 chips, deploying them in Thailand and reaching them remotely. That statement was not coordinated with the Commerce Department.
Megaspeed, a Singapore-registered company that bought Nvidia hardware through a Malaysian subsidiary, is under investigation by Singapore police and by Commerce over whether it sidestepped export controls. Alibaba reaches Nvidia chips through the company. A separate Taiwanese smuggling investigation searched a Supermicro office and three affiliated companies in June.
A bill to extend export controls to remote access is pending in Congress. The Remote Access Security Act would amend the Export Control Reform Act to let the bureau license and penalize remote access by foreign persons to controlled items over a network or a cloud service. The House passed the bill, H.R. 2683, on January 12 by 369 votes to 22. A Senate companion introduced by Dave McCormick and Ron Wyden, S. 3519, sits in the Banking Committee. The act has not become law.
The department has approved direct sales into China over the same period, clearing H200 shipments to roughly ten Chinese buyers in 2026. A draft Commerce rule reported in July 2025 would have required licenses for AI chip shipments to Malaysia and Thailand; it was never issued.
The review is at the list-building stage. The bureau has announced no enforcement action tied to it.
Sources: Bloomberg, The Next Web, CNBC
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By the Control Plane Editorial Team