The US approved Nvidia chip sales to a Chinese firm. Its listed office was an empty shell.
The Commerce Department cleared New Matrix to assemble Nvidia H200 chips. The New York Times visited its listed address and found wires hanging where lights should be.
On November 7, the New York Times reported that the US Commerce Department approved Nvidia H200 chip sales to a Chinese firm called New Matrix, whose listed Beijing office turned out to be empty. Wires hung from the ceiling where lights should have been. Nobody at the building, not the directory, not the property manager, had heard of the company.
What got approved, and who it went to
The H200 is Nvidia’s export-grade chip for China, the version Washington allows after the Trump administration eased earlier Biden-era limits. Nvidia agreed to give the US government a 15% cut of its China AI chip sales as part of that deal, and Jensen Huang has spent months lobbying for wider access. So the chips themselves aren’t the surprise. The surprise is who got waved through to buy them.
According to the Times, New Matrix’s ownership traces back to Wise Road, a Chinese private equity fund the US has had on its restricted entity list since 2024. Two analysts told the paper New Matrix may simply be a front for that fund, though that’s their read of the corporate paperwork, not a government finding, and nobody has charged New Matrix with anything.
| Firm | What the Times found | Status |
|---|---|---|
| New Matrix | Listed Beijing address was an empty shell; building directory and property manager had no record of it | Approved to buy H200 chips; ties to blacklisted Wise Road alleged by analysts |
| Maginfra | A second firm with a deserted office when a reporter checked in September | Also approved; roughly two dozen firms cleared through the same process |
What’s still unverified
Neither Commerce nor New Matrix answered the Times’s questions about the empty office, and the department hasn’t said anything about revoking the approval. The Times cites people familiar with the approval process who weren’t named, so the full list of roughly two dozen cleared firms stays unverified beyond New Matrix and Maginfra. A note on sources: the Times’s own reporters visited the offices in Beijing; everything else here, including The Verge’s framing of the pattern, relies on that one piece of original reporting, which this post cites directly rather than treating as settled fact.
My read
The 15% cut gives the US government a reason to want these sales to keep happening, and whoever reviews buyer applications doesn’t seem to be checking basic things like whether an address has a working light switch. That’s a low bar to fail. I don’t think it means export controls are fake, but it does mean the vetting between “approved on paper” and “actually a shell company tied to a blacklisted fund” is thinner than the policy debate about chip performance and model capability usually assumes. A rule is only as good as who checks it’s being followed, and right now that looks like it was nobody, until a newspaper did.
What I don’t know yet: whether Commerce will claw back this specific approval, whether New Matrix (if it’s real at all) ever took delivery of chips, and how many of the other roughly two dozen approved firms have the same problem. Those are the next things worth watching here, not another round of “is the H200 too powerful” debate.
China’s own export rules moved in the opposite direction over the past month, restricting what leaves the country rather than what comes in; see China’s draft AI export controls for what that draft actually covers.
Related: the same week, a separate Times investigation led to a US intelligence memo alleging China recruited a Megaspeed executive to spy on Jensen Huang, a story about chip-export vetting from a different angle. Congressional Democrats then opened a records probe into the same H200 deal, questioning the tariff and the donations.