보안업체가 중국텔레콤 내부에서 32개의 NVIDIA B300 GPU가 가동 중인 것을 발견했으며, 이는 미국의 수출 통제가 최상위 AI 하드웨어의 중국 유입을 막지 못하고 있음을 시사한다.

NVIDIA's flagship Blackwell Ultra B300 has found its way into Chinese infrastructure. An investigation by the Israeli security firm Lava revealed that 32 of these high-performance units were operating inside the network of China Telecom, a state-owned telecommunications giant. The report concludes that, despite U.S. export controls, these GPUs are still reaching Chinese soil, albeit through illegal channels. When a trade ban is in place, smuggling becomes the only way to obtain NVIDIA's latest AI hardware.

The restricted GPUs were identified remotely, and NVIDIA does not appear concerned. A company spokesperson described the situation as "a drop in the bucket."

Because of U.S. export controls, Chinese technology giants such as ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent have relied on GPUs like the RTX PRO 5500 for AI inference. Those chips are clearly less capable than the B300. What stands out is how China Telecom obtained Blackwell Ultra hardware. According to The Information, Lava identified the restricted processors remotely through NVIDIA's Data Center GPU Manager (DCGM) Exporter tool.

Data center operators install this software to diagnose the health of internal servers, but the tool was accessible over the open internet without password protection. Although the software confirmed the presence of 32 B300 units on China Telecom's network, their physical location could not be determined.

The reasons for the trade ban on hardware like the B300 are clear. It carries 288GB of HBM3E memory across eight 12-high stacks, with 8TB/s of memory bandwidth over an 8,192-bit interface, making it one of the most powerful AI acceleration architectures available. It is capable of handling demanding workloads such as reasoning-based large language models, and offers up to 50 percent higher memory and FP4 compute capability than previous generations. These performance gains are precisely why the chip is subject to tight distribution restrictions. Under U.S. export policies, vendors may sell B300 GPUs only to whitelisted customers who commit to preventing diverted sales to embargoed parties. Despite these trade barriers, illicit networks continue to move cutting-edge hardware into Chinese data centers, and NVIDIA does not appear to be overly concerned.

In comments to Tom's Hardware, a company spokesperson said smuggled NVIDIA GPUs are "a drop in the bucket" compared with what China already possesses. NVIDIA stated that diverted U.S. products make up less than 0.5 percent of deployed inventory. Still, if 32 units can be found inside China Telecom, it is reasonable to ask whether more B300s are operating in other state-backed institutions.