Israeli security firm Lava says it identified 32 Nvidia B300 GPUs, export-controlled Blackwell Ultra accelerators, reporting through publicly exposed monitoring endpoints with IP addresses geolocated to China. Lava cautioned that IP geolocation is not definitive and that the finding “does not establish that any export-control violation occurred.”
The GPUs surfaced through Nvidia’s DCGM Exporter, a tool that publishes GPU telemetry over HTTP so monitoring systems can collect it. Across four scans between March and May 2026, Lava observed roughly 2,100 hosts serving those metrics without authentication. They reported more than 12,000 unique GPUs and were associated with nearly 300 organizations. The endpoints disclosed exact GPU model names and unique device identifiers.
Lava counted 4,724 unique GPUs reporting through China-geolocated addresses. Of those, 374 were from four Blackwell models: 32 B300s, 78 RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition cards, 112 RTX PRO 5000 Blackwell cards and 152 GeForce RTX 5090s. About 86 percent of the 374 were reported in eight-GPU configurations, which Lava said is consistent with compute servers rather than desktop workstations.
The China-geolocated inventory also included 1,156 RTX 4090 cards, which have been subject to US export restrictions since 2023, and 160 RTX 4090D cards, a version Nvidia developed for the Chinese market. Lava noted that the RTX PRO 6000 Server Edition and standard RTX 5090 differ from the China-market RTX PRO 6000D and RTX 5090D, and that identifying them on China-geolocated addresses does not by itself show they were exported in violation of regulations.
A proxy, VPN or tunnel could route traffic through an address in China while the hardware sits elsewhere, Lava said. Some news coverage of the findings, including Digitimes, linked the endpoints to state-owned China Telecom. Lava’s own write-up describes the addresses as geolocated to China and does not name a network operator.
On October 1, federal agents arrested a California company owner accused of routing more than $300 million in export-controlled GPU servers to Chinese buyers, and Taiwan has said it plans to make unlicensed AI chip exports to China a crime.
In earlier research published October 8, Lava reported CVE-2026-47483, a high-severity vulnerability rated 8.2 in which unauthenticated requests to the exporter’s profiling endpoints could exhaust its resources and crash GPU monitoring. Nvidia addressed it in DCGM Exporter 4.8.2. Lava said about a quarter of the exposed hosts in its scans served those profiling endpoints.
Across its global sample, Lava found that about half the exposed GPUs were consumer or workstation cards and that roughly 60 percent reported zero utilization at the time of each scan. Endpoints in the United States accounted for 44 percent of the GPUs, followed by Romania with 17 percent and China with 16 percent.
Lava recommends that GPU monitoring endpoints not be reachable from the public internet, and that operators upgrade DCGM Exporter to version 4.8.2 or later with profiling disabled unless it is needed.
Sources: Lava, Lava (CVE-2026-47483), Digitimes
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By the Control Plane Editorial Team