Inspur Renamed Unit to Keep Buying Nvidia AI Chips — SkimNews
Get the Tech newsletter
Daily tech — startups, AI labs, chips, the launches that shape the next decade. Free.
- Inspur Group was added to the US entity list in March 2023 — a blacklist of more than 3,000 companies deemed security risks — over its work with the Chinese military.
- Inspur swapped the signage outside its Silicon Valley office from "Inspur" to "Aivres" after the blacklisting, with the renamed subsidiary continuing the parent's work building a global network that supplies computing power to China's AI industry.
- Aivres appears to have exploited several loopholes in US export law to keep shipping Nvidia's best chips to China's leading AI firms, helping Inspur sidestep the American restrictions.
- Federal officials have begun investigating Aivres' business, though the status of that inquiry is unclear, according to four officials who spoke on condition of anonymity.
- The New York Times examined thousands of shipment records, corporate documents, and supply contracts, visited sites in China, Southeast Asia, and California, and interviewed more than a dozen current and former officials, tech executives, and industry analysts.
Why it matters: Inspur was blacklisted in March 2023 specifically because of its military ties, yet a simple rebrand of its Silicon Valley unit appears to have kept Nvidia's top AI chips flowing into China's AI ecosystem — exposing how a renamed subsidiary can render entity-list restrictions porous and putting the scope of US export enforcement under fresh scrutiny.
Ask SkimNews
