The US Commerce Department is clearing Nvidia’s H200 accelerators for Chinese firms with ties to blacklisted companies. The Verge picked up a New York Times investigation on Saturday, and the central case is quickly told: New Matrix sits on the list of approved buyers. According to the Times its offices are empty, “a hollow gray shell with wires dangling from the ceiling where lights should be.”
There is more. Barely anything about New Matrix can be found online, and the company has existed for 17 months. It does not appear in the directory of the building it lists as its address. At the industrial park’s property management agency, a receptionist and a manager each said they had no record of the firm.
The owners lead to a blacklist
What is known about New Matrix does not improve matters. Its owners are tied to a Chinese private equity house that the US government has had on the Entity List since 2024. And the Times frames this not as an isolated slip but as a pattern: companies connected to entities under national-security trade restrictions getting cleared to buy Nvidia chips.
Which leaves the question of whether anyone checks at all. Not Commerce and not Nvidia, on the reading of this investigation.
The loosening hung on a 15 percent cut
Under Biden, Nvidia was barred from selling the chips to China. The Trump administration relaxed the limits after Nvidia agreed to hand the government 15 percent of all sales. Alongside that ran an intense lobbying campaign by Jensen Huang, who according to US intelligence was the target of an operation by China’s Ministry of State Security — there is a separate piece on that today.
A clearance list without checks is not export control
The mechanics are the unsettling part. A clearance is only as good as the vetting behind it, and in the case of New Matrix nobody appears to have checked whether the company exists. A list that waves through firms whose address is an empty room controls nothing; it only documents.
For the model world, more hangs on this than politics. If accelerators reach data centers they were never cleared for via intermediaries, that quietly shifts where training capacity gets built. And if Washington responds with a blanket tightening, it will also hit the supply chains Anthropic, OpenAI and Google depend on.