An export licence is a promise, and an empty office in Beijing tested it

The weekend’s most useful technology story was not about a model or a share price. It was about an address. According to The New York Times, as relayed by The Verge and Tom’s Hardware, two little-known Chinese firms on the US-approved list to handle Nvidia’s H200 chips, New Matrix and Maginfra, list offices that turned out to be empty^1,2. The Times described New Matrix’s space as “a hollow gray shell with wires dangling from the ceiling where lights should be”; the building directory did not list the firm, and the nearby property agency had no record of it¹.

The approved list. Most names on it are household ones: Baidu, BYD, Tesla Shanghai, Alibaba, Tencent and ByteDance, and also ZTE, which has previously been blacklisted from the US market². The two obscure firms were cleared to assemble H200s into servers, the reports say, and the Times found that people linked to them also have links to entities under US trade restrictions; New Matrix’s owners, for instance, have ties to a private-equity firm blacklisted since 2024^1,2. The question the reports raise is one of vetting: who checked, and how.

The policy behind it. Sales of advanced Nvidia chips to China were restricted under the previous administration; the current one relaxed the limits after Nvidia agreed to give the government a 15% cut of the sales, The Verge notes¹. “I have a ton of concerns that neither the Commerce Department or Nvidia is doing the due diligence needed to ensure that the licensing terms are being followed,” Liza Tobin, a former China director at the White House National Security Council, told the Times².

Why it matters to you. An export regime is only as good as its dull parts: the site visit, the end-use check, the audit that someone actually reads. Those are cheap compared with the chips they govern, and they are what separates a rule from a revenue share. The constructive reading of the weekend is that a newspaper with reporters on the ground did the check, in public, and the system now has to answer it.