The GPU Black Market That Washington Can't Shut Down
The story began over drinks with a neocloud operator referred to as "James," who described his company's NVIDIA GPU allocations, the deals it was closing, and the facilities it was building — then mentioned, almost as an aside, that "most of these chips end up in China." He said it not as a confession or a whisper, but the way you'd say the sky is blue. He was far from the only one: over several months the reporters spoke with multiple neocloud operators, GPU brokers, data center developers, and distributors across the US and Asia, and the conversations had a strange uniformity — everyone knew, everyone had a version of the same story, and nobody seemed worried about telling it.
The mechanics of the market are surprisingly open. There are warehouses in Hong Kong full of Western and Chinese electronics where, if you know whom to ask, you can buy an export-controlled NVIDIA H200 for roughly 213,000 HKD — about $29,700, near the US list price. That price matters: supply is abundant enough that smuggling hasn't even inflated the market. You don't need to travel there either — searching eBay for H100 or H200 GPUs returns mostly sellers shipping from China. The H100 has been export-banned to China since October 2022, while the H200 ban was lifted only in December 2025, and neither timeline explains how either chip is plentiful in Shenzhen.
A 2025 Gamers Nexus investigation spent roughly three weeks filming across Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Taipei. One source, a middleman identified only as "Mr. 5," described the situation bluntly: vendors, brokers, and everyone in the process know about it, but "open one eye, close one eye." Asked whether his company would stop if NVIDIA wanted it to, he answered simply, "No" — the Chinese market is too big and too profitable to walk away from.
On the policy side, the US treats these chips as instruments of national security concern subject to strict export controls. Since October 2022 the Bureau of Industry and Security has issued four rounds of restrictions, each tighter than the last, with the stated goal of slowing China's ability to train frontier AI models and build AI-enabled weapons systems. The excerpt cuts off as it turns to how that enforcement is actually working.