Banned Nvidia Chips Cost 2x to 3x More on China's Black Market, FT Finds Nvidia's restricted AI hardware isn't just reaching Chinese buyers through the black market. It's selling there for double or triple the US price, according to a Financial Times investigation that tracked pricing across multiple chip traders. The DGX B300 system, which retails in the US for roughly $400,000, now trades above 8 million yuan (about $1.1 million) on Chinese gray-market channels.
Six months ago, the same system was around 4 million yuan. The RTX 6000 Pro workstation card, built on the same Blackwell architecture, has climbed from roughly 50,000 yuan at the start of the year to as much as 130,000 yuan, per trader interviews cited by the FT.
Even five-year-old hardware is getting swept up. Servers built on Nvidia's A100 accelerator, a data-center GPU launched in 2020, have tripled from about 200,000 yuan to as much as 600,000 yuan since late last year, the FT reported.
Buyers are also snapping up gaming GPUs that can be modified to run AI inference workloads, with traders telling the outlet they're running low on stock despite the rising prices. The price surge traces directly to a US enforcement crackdown that took shape late last year. In March, US prosecutors charged three people tied to Super Micro Computer, including co-founder Yih-Shyan "Wally" Liaw, with helping divert about $2.5 billion of Nvidia-powered servers to China.
Authorities in Taiwan and Malaysia subsequently opened their own smuggling investigations, drying up the re-export routes traders had relied on.
Building data centers from smuggled chips is a "dead-end," Nvidia told the outlet, adding that it provides no support or repairs for restricted products.
Beijing has also closed legal channels from its side. Chinese customs were instructed to block H200 shipments at the border even after the Trump administration approved them under a licensing regime.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick later confirmed Nvidia hadn't sold a single H200 to a Chinese company months after the approval.
Both pushes steer buyers toward the same destination: Huawei, which launched its Ascend 950PR inference chip in March. The 950PR is undergoing testing at large data-center clients, but output remains limited, and its CANN software stack trails Nvidia's CUDA ecosystem.
One trader told the FT that moving away from Nvidia hardware had become harder as rising memory prices compounded the shortage, a knock-on from the DRAM and HBM crunch now hitting every tier of the AI hardware stack.
GPU rental rates inside China now match or exceed US levels, the FT survey found, reversing the discount that abundant smuggled supply once provided. Washington's export controls may have been designed as a wall.
On the ground in China. They look more like a toll booth.
