China’s military has sought Nvidia chips for years, the report said
Jensen Huang, chief executive of Nvidia, said the Chinese military does not rely on chips from his California company. However, an analysis of six years of Chinese records shows that the Chinese military has been openly seeking Nvidia AI chips since 2019.
Chinese records reviewed by Wirescreen, a software platform that provides information on Chinese companies, showed that the People’s Liberation Army has increased its efforts to acquire artificial intelligence chips, even after the US government restricted the sale of semiconductors to foreign adversaries, including China.
The records document instances where suppliers agreed to supply these chips on the military’s terms, but do not document the final delivery. However, John Costello, the Wirescreen analyst who wrote the report, said the data “directly and irrefutably” shows that US technology is equipping China’s military.
“What number of advanced Nvidia chips in PLA hands does the company consider acceptable?” he asked.
Drawing on more data than previously examined, the report shows how China has adapted and tried to circumvent US technological restrictions in recent years.
Wirescreen examined 3,800 purchase records related to chips and computing. It discovered more than 500 instances of various units of the Chinese military searching for Nvidia chips either by name or by technical specification.
The technology has been sought by almost every branch of the Chinese military, including units that work on nuclear explosive simulations, conduct offensive cyber attacks and plan war games.
The report was shared with the Trump administration and Congress, who are debating the future of Nvidia’s sales to China. In December, President Trump, who has become a close ally of Mr. Huang, approved the sale of Nvidia’s second-best chip to China, demanding a cut of that revenue for the government. But Republican lawmakers, worried that the advanced chips could help China’s military, have introduced legislation that would strip the White House of sole responsibility for exporting AI chips.
Mr. Huang has fought chip restrictions and urged lawmakers to allow Nvidia to sell to China. He said blocking Nvidia from China, the world’s largest semiconductor market, would cede the market to rival Chinese products that can now do much of what Nvidia chips do. He has too released fears of Chinese military use of chips as overblown.
Advanced AI systems typically run on networks with 100,000 chips or more, said John Rizzo, a spokesman for Nvidia. In Wirescreen’s analysis, the number of chips required by China’s military fell well short, suggesting that Beijing is relying at least somewhat on domestic chipmakers such as Huawei as the country strives to be technologically self-sufficient.
Procurement documents also showed that China’s military is specifically looking for Huawei chips as Chinese technology improves, Rizzo said. He called the idea that the Chinese military relies on a small number of Nvidia chips “stupid” and “untrue.”
“China has more than enough domestic chips for all its military applications, millions to spare,” Rizzo said in a statement. “Just as it makes no sense for the US military to use Chinese technology, it makes no sense for the Chinese military to depend on American technology.”
However, procurement documents from 2019 to 2025 show that China’s military continued to seek Nvidia chips for more advanced computing applications. They include the Nvidia A100, A800, H100 and H800 chips, both before and after these chips were inspected by the US government.
Administration officials and congressional staffers were briefed on the report’s findings last week.
Rep. John Moolenaar of Michigan, the Republican chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, said the report shows how China is trying to “smuggle and steal American technology for military purposes.”
Mr. Moolenaar, who recently introduced legislation to limit China’s access to American technology, said that is why the United States needs export controls “to protect our advantage in the AI race and to make sure we don’t arm China.”
Congress is considering several rules that would limit foreign sales of advanced technology. One introduced last year, the AI OVERWATCH Act, would require the Commerce Department to certify that AI chips will not be used to aid adversary militaries and would give Congress the power to block chip exports.
In January, the House Foreign Affairs Committee supported the bill by a vote of 42 to 2. It still needs to clear the full House and Senate, and it is unclear whether the president would sign it.
Industry experts and government officials have debated whether U.S. technology controls have held back China’s technological progress or will fail to do so by encouraging the Chinese government to develop domestic alternatives.
Trump officials have lifted global restrictions on sales of Nvidia chips issued at the end of the Biden administration, saying they were stifling American technology firms. However, the move allowed subsidiaries of Chinese companies based outside of China to legally purchase Nvidia’s most advanced chips, he said Chris McGuire, former State Department official.
On Sunday, the Trump administration issued a clarification of its rules, which say companies need to obtain a license from the US government to sell controlled chips to Chinese companies anywhere in the world.
China also continued to develop its domestic technology. Last week Huawei exposed a breakthrough in chip development that it said would allow it to produce high-end chips within five years. The company is expected to produce millions of chips this year, according to SemiAnalysis, a semiconductor research firm.
China has regulations that encourage its military to use domestic technology products. Procurement records show the military has awarded contracts to Chinese companies that rely on Huawei’s AI chips, which have been a key selling point, according to an analysis by the Jamestown Foundation, a China-focused policy group.
Mr Costello said Wirescreen’s analysis showed US restrictions had slowed Chinese technology purchases, although the military eventually developed strategies to work around them.
“It introduces a lot of friction, it makes compromises, it slows them down,” he said.
For example, he said, the Jiangnan Institute of Computing Technology, one of the main research institutes for China’s cyberspace forces, appeared to have more trouble obtaining chips after the United States imposed export controls in 2022 and 2023. Some bids the institute made for American AI technology were not completed and the group had to rewrite them in a different form.
China’s cyberspace force, which is responsible for cyber warfare, reconnaissance and domestic surveillance, was the largest single buyer among China’s military branches of US AI technology in the documents, and the Jiangnan Institute was blacklisted in 2019 for developing supercomputers for the Chinese military.
The Chinese military and companies associated with it have adapted to US export controls by finding new ways to acquire the technology, Mr Costello said. The military has reduced some of its technical requirements and used new channels to acquire chips that have obscured its role. This included bringing in new types of companies to buy the chips, ranging from established technology firms to shell companies. It took the military about a year to adapt, Mr. Costello said.
A spokesman for the Chinese embassy said that China consistently promotes cooperation with the United States and opposes the weaponization of technological and economic issues.
The procurement records provided some clues as to how Nvidia’s technology was used. In January 2024, the Beijing-based Military Cyber Security Division was looking for four AI servers equipped with Nvidia A100 chips. He stated that the device needs to support a tool called hashcat, which is used to crack passwords.
Mr Costello said a military unit using AI servers to run hashcat software would most likely use the chips to more easily break into password-protected accounts, including possibly training an AI system to perform hacking.
It is unclear whether some military entities may have obtained Nvidia chips to try to take them apart and understand their vulnerabilities or to replicate the technology.
The report also documents that research institutes linked to China’s military have increasingly gained remote access to the chips by renting them from commercial data centers.
Wirescreen research builds to earlier analysis It found that the Chinese military is buying American chips to support its AI push
Sen. Jim Banks, an Indiana Republican who supports the AI OVERWATCH Act, called the Chinese military’s access to US chips a “national security crisis.”