Lava, an Israeli security firm, says it has identified 32 Nvidia Blackwell Ultra B300 chips on network infrastructure associated with China Telecom, a state-owned Chinese telecommunications provider.
The B300 is barred from export to Chinese buyers under current U.S. export controls, and can only be sold to whitelisted purchasers who agree not to re-export the chips to sanctioned parties.
Lava found the hardware using Nvidia's DCGM Exporter, a monitoring tool that reports GPU health and performance and that data centre operators can install internally, but which Lava found exposed online without password authentication in this case.
The firm could not confirm where the chips are physically located, and the evidence links them to China Telecom-related network addresses without proving the company owns or hosts them directly, according to research into the findings.
Lava's wider scan reportedly turned up roughly 2,100 exposed monitoring hosts worldwide, covering more than 12,000 GPUs across nearly 300 organizations, spanning H100, H200, B300 and consumer RTX 4090 and 5090 cards.
Nvidia did not dispute Lava's findings but downplayed their significance.
"Governments, researchers, and media have all found insignificant diversion of controlled US products, less than one half of one percent in recent court cases, a drop in the bucket compared to the ocean of domestic compute China already has," an Nvidia spokesperson said, adding that smuggling remains "a nonfactor, blocked by governments on both sides of the globe."
The report follows a pattern of leakage around the chip: in 2025, Chinese buyers reportedly smuggled $1 billion worth of Nvidia AI chips into the country within three months, and in August nine people were indicted in Taiwan over illegal B300 exports, days after Supermicro confirmed it had fired staff following a smuggling investigation involving Taiwanese trading firm Flying Tiget Tech.
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