Reuters finds $3.2 billion in China AI projects naming restricted Nvidia chips

The Reuters review looked at more than 150 procurement notices, investment plans and corporate records, and the individual projects it surfaced show how the pattern plays out across regions. A proposed computing center in Fujian province is valued at 6.2 billion yuan ($873 million) and specifies H100 servers while still seeking financing partners. In Shaanxi, a state-owned engineering group won a contract linked to a 3 billion yuan center naming H100 and H200 chips, and a 2.26 billion yuan project in Jilin proposes combining Nvidia hardware with Chinese processors. Inner Mongolia has another proposed development specifying 625 H200 servers, while authorities in Wuxi reported that an H800 computing cluster began operating in March 2025. Reuters notes that operating facilities and proposed investments are not evidence of the same level of chip access.

The background is a set of escalating U.S. restrictions. The United States began restricting advanced AI chip sales to China in 2022, citing national security concerns, and H100 shipments remain more tightly restricted than H200 exports, which the Commerce Department moved to case-by-case review in January 2026 while still requiring licenses. Nvidia's processors can carry out thousands of calculations at once, and its widely used software makes switching to rival systems more complicated and potentially expensive, which helps explain why Chinese developers keep designing around familiar equipment.

China's domestic alternative is growing. Z.AI has already released an image-generation model trained entirely on Huawei chips, demonstrating that competitive systems need not depend on American hardware. Even so, the new project records show how deeply Nvidia remains embedded in Chinese AI infrastructure plans, and they add pressure on U.S. officials facing congressional scrutiny over how advanced chip export rules are enforced.