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| AI-generated illustration of an empty office with dangling wires, a glowing AI chip on a desk, and server racks beside a city skyline at dusk. |
On Saturday 7 November 2026, The New York Times published an investigation that asked an uncomfortable question about some of the most powerful computer chips in the world: who, exactly, is the United States letting handle them? The paper reported that the US Commerce Department had approved roughly two dozen Chinese companies to buy or handle Nvidia's H200 artificial intelligence chips — and that when its reporters visited the listed address of one of those companies, a firm called New Matrix, they found an empty office. Not a busy factory floor or a small startup office, but a hollow grey shell in a newly built industrial park on the north-west fringe of Beijing, with wires dangling from the ceiling where lights should be. The building directory did not list the company, and the industrial park's property managers said they had no record of it. The story was quickly picked up by The Verge, The Business Times of Singapore and other outlets, and it has become one of the most talked-about AI stories of the weekend. This guide explains what the investigation actually found, what it did not prove, how the H200 sales were approved in the first place, and what to watch next.
A word of caution before the detail. An empty office is a striking image, but it is not proof of wrongdoing, and this article will not treat it as one. Nothing in the reporting says that any H200 chips were actually delivered to New Matrix, and the company may have been licensed to handle them without ever receiving a shipment. The ties the investigation describes — between the owners of approved companies and firms on the US trade blacklist — are drawn from Chinese corporate records and the assessments of analysts, not from findings by any government agency. The Commerce Department has not publicly explained how it vetted these applicants, and the companies named in the reporting did not respond to requests for comment. Where this article quotes a figure or a claim, it says who reported it, and where the facts are still unknown, it says so plainly. That distinction matters, because the gap between a suspicious-looking approval and a proven violation is exactly what the US government will now have to close — or explain.
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What the investigation found: New Matrix
The centrepiece of the investigation is New Matrix, a Chinese company that was created only 17 months ago, according to the reporting. Earlier in 2026, the Trump administration approved it to assemble Nvidia's H200 chips into the computers that create artificial intelligence — the servers that power AI data centres. Before any H200 chips could be sold to China, the Commerce Department was required to review the companies involved for national security risks. New Matrix passed that review.
What the Times reporters found when they checked on the company is the part that has drawn the most attention. At the building New Matrix lists as its address, in a recently built industrial park on the outskirts of Beijing, there was no sign of the firm: no listing in the building directory, and no record of it with the nearby property management agency, whose receptionist and manager both said they had never heard of the company. When the Commerce Department granted its approval earlier this year, New Matrix's registered address was at a compound on the outskirts of Beijing used for corporate registrations, where thousands of other firms are also registered on paper, according to the Chinese corporate information site Qichacha. But this autumn, its address changed to the empty office in the industrial park that the Times visited. The company's website, as of 6 November, does not name any staff members, advertise any jobs or include information about its history. Very little information about the firm can be found online at all.
The corporate records raise a second question. According to Chinese corporate records examined for the investigation, New Matrix's owners have ties to a prominent Chinese private equity fund that the US government placed on its trade blacklist in 2024. Two analysts who examined the corporate records and other Chinese-language information said they believed New Matrix may be a front for firms associated with that fund. The fund is Wise Road Capital: in 2024, the Commerce Department added it to the "entity list", which restricts companies from doing business with the United States, saying it had helped the Chinese government acquire strategically sensitive companies with chip technology. Two of New Matrix's primary owners appear in the records of companies connected to Wise Road and its founder, Li Bin, according to WireScreen, a data platform. Li is also the chair of Tsinghua Unigroup, a technology conglomerate with government ownership, and in 2021 one of Tsinghua Unigroup's subsidiaries, New H3C Semiconductor Technologies, was added to the entity list for working with the Chinese military.
None of that is a finding that New Matrix broke the law, and the reporting does not claim otherwise. But it is the reason the story has travelled so far: a company with almost no visible existence, approved to handle some of the most tightly controlled AI hardware on the market, whose owners are linked to a fund the US government itself blacklisted for acquiring sensitive chip companies. Liza Tobin, the former China director for the White House National Security Council in the first Trump and Biden administrations, told the Times the approvals raised questions about how rigorously the Trump administration is policing who can get their hands on Nvidia's chips. "I have a tonne of concerns that neither the Commerce Department or Nvidia is doing the due diligence needed to ensure that the licensing terms are being followed," she said.
Maginfra: the second empty office
New Matrix is not the only case. The investigation reports that it is the second Chinese company approved to handle Nvidia's H200 chips that does not seem to have any physical presence at its listed address. The first was Maginfra, another recently created Chinese firm that received a licence for H200 chips — a licence the Times first reported in September. Like New Matrix, Maginfra appears to have been approved not as the ultimate buyer of the chips, but as a company that would assemble them into AI servers for another customer. And like New Matrix, when a Times reporter visited Maginfra's listed address in September, it also appeared deserted: a few chairs and empty desks sat inside a small locked room with no signs, workers on the floor said they had not seen anyone use the office, and building receptionists said they had not heard of Maginfra.
Analysts said they believed Maginfra was an offshoot of Inspur, a company whose headquarters were near Maginfra's listed address. The US government has added Inspur to the entity list for working with the Chinese military. Maginfra and Inspur share personnel and patents, and both have government ownership. The pattern the investigation describes is therefore not a single odd approval, but a repeated one: newly created companies, approved to assemble advanced AI chips, with empty offices and links to firms already under US national-security restrictions. That repetition is what has turned a single strange address into a story about the screening process itself.
The wider pattern: other approved companies with military ties
The investigation goes further, reporting that other Chinese companies approved for licences to buy Nvidia's H200 chips also have ties, through their corporate owners, to military suppliers, according to people familiar with the approvals and documents viewed by the Times. Two are named. One, Zhejiang Yindun Cloud Technology, has ties to a cloud computing giant called Range Intelligent Computing Technology Group, which has sold services to military contractors. Yindun is partly operated from a data centre owned by Range, and several of its executives are family members of Range's founder. Range serves as the cloud computing provider for a satellite programme run by the defence bureau of Hebei province, which it has described on its website as serving the strategic needs of "national defence development". It also started a subsidiary in 2016 to focus on quantum communications for the Chinese government and military, and part of that subsidiary is owned by a firm the United States added to the entity list in 2021 for acquiring American items for the Chinese military.
The other named company is Shanghai Jiatang, which grew out of a state-owned enterprise called Datang Telecom, a chipmaker that provides technology to the Chinese military. Datang is controlled by the China Academy of Telecommunications Technology, a state-owned enterprise that has developed cryptography for the Chinese military. Shanghai Jiatang, Yindun Cloud and Maginfra did not respond to requests for comment, according to the reporting. Taken together, the named cases describe a licensing round in which roughly two dozen Chinese companies were cleared, several of which have ownership links — directly or through parent companies — to firms the US has already restricted for national-security reasons. The Commerce Department has not said how it weighed those links, or whether it considers them a problem at all.
How the H200 sales were approved
To understand why these approvals happened, it helps to know the recent history of AI chip controls. During the Biden administration, the United States began restricting sales of AI chips to China more broadly, out of concern the technology would help China advance militarily. Nvidia's most advanced chips were already off limits. But President Trump eased some of those limits after lobbying by Nvidia's chief executive, Jensen Huang, with whom he has grown close during his second term. In December 2025, Trump gave Nvidia permission to sell the H200 — an older but still powerful AI chip — to China, as long as the US government was given a cut of the sales. In an unusual arrangement, Trump is also requiring the chips, which are assembled in Taiwan, to be routed through the United States on their way to China, so that the government can collect a 25 per cent tariff on their value.
That decision set up the licensing process the investigation is now questioning. Before the chips could be sold, the Commerce Department had to review the companies involved for national security risks — and it approved about two dozen of them. The approvals cover firms that can buy the chips or assemble them into AI servers, and the list includes major corporations such as Baidu, BYD and Tesla Shanghai alongside the newly created firms the investigation focuses on. The question the Times reporting raises is not whether the H200 sales themselves were authorised — they were, by the President — but whether the company-by-company screening that was supposed to follow was rigorous enough to catch shell-like applicants and blacklisted connections. So far, the Commerce Department has not publicly explained its vetting, and Nvidia has not said what due diligence it performed on the companies it supplies through these licences.
Why the chips matter, and why the sales are still small
Nvidia's chips are the crucial technology in AI data centres and now one of the world's most coveted commodities. They are also at the heart of the economic and geopolitical competition between the United States and China, which is why export controls on them have become one of the most sensitive areas of US trade policy. The H200 is not Nvidia's newest chip, but it remains powerful enough to train and run advanced AI models, and access to it is valuable to any company building AI infrastructure.
And yet, for all the attention, the actual sales to China remain small. Nvidia is now selling only small amounts of H200 chips to China. The Chinese government has been slow to approve its companies for the purchases, partly because it is trying to promote domestically made chips. In the quarter that ended in July, H200 shipments to customers based in China made up less than 1 per cent of Nvidia's revenue from data centres, and the company said in August that it was not assuming any sales to China in its estimate for data centre revenue for the current quarter. But many Chinese companies are gaining access to Nvidia chips through data centres in South-east Asia, and the chips still appear to be a critical focus for Beijing. The Times reported in October that Huang had a close relationship with a woman who American spy agencies concluded was an intelligence asset for China — reporting Abloominst covered in a separate article on 7 November — and the company she worked at, Megaspeed, operated data centres in South-east Asia that served Chinese clients and was being investigated for smuggling some chips into China. The New Matrix investigation is therefore the second major Nvidia-China story in a month, and the two together describe a control system under strain from several directions at once.
What to watch next
The story is still developing, and several questions have no public answer yet. Here is a short checklist of what to watch as it unfolds:
- Whether the Commerce Department responds publicly, and whether it explains how New Matrix and Maginfra passed its national-security review — or revokes or reviews any of the licences.
- Whether Nvidia says anything about its own due diligence on the companies approved to handle its chips, and whether it pauses shipments while the questions are answered.
- Whether any H200 chips were actually delivered to New Matrix or Maginfra. So far no reporting says they were, and approval to handle chips is not the same as receiving them.
- Whether the full list of roughly two dozen approved companies is published, and whether other names on it have similar ownership links to blacklisted firms or military contractors.
- Whether Congress or other oversight bodies ask for a review of the H200 licensing process, and whether the episode changes the terms of future AI chip sales to China.
- Whether the Chinese government, which has been slow to approve H200 purchases while promoting domestic chips, changes its position — or whether the episode gives Beijing a reason to push its own chipmakers harder.
The most important of these is the first. If the Commerce Department can show that the approvals were checked properly and that the empty offices have an innocent explanation — for example, that the companies are assemblers operating from other premises — then the story becomes a cautionary tale about appearances. If it cannot, then the licensing process itself becomes the story, and the H200 round becomes the case study for how export controls can fail in practice.
Bottom line
A New York Times investigation published on 7 November found that the US government approved a 17-month-old Chinese company with an empty Beijing office to assemble Nvidia's H200 AI chips, and that the company's owners are linked to a private equity fund the US blacklisted in 2024. It also found a second approved company with a deserted office, and other approved companies with ties to military suppliers. None of that proves a law was broken, and no reporting says any chips were actually delivered — but it does raise a serious question about how carefully the United States is checking who gets access to its most powerful AI hardware. Until the Commerce Department answers that question, the empty offices in Beijing will keep being the image that defines this story.
Reference sources
- The Business Times (Singapore), "Empty offices, ties to blacklisted firms: Inside the Chinese companies the US cleared for Nvidia chips" (syndication of The New York Times investigation, 7 November 2026): https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/companies-markets/telcos-media-tech/us-cleared-dozens-chinese-firms-handle-nvidia-chips-some-ties-sanctioned-companies
- The Jerusalem Post, "US approved Nvidia chip sales to China-linked firms" (7 November 2026): https://livefrontend.jpost.com/business-and-innovation/tech-and-start-ups/article-914132
- Tech Insider, "Nvidia H200 China Approval Hits an Empty Office" (7 November 2026): https://tech-insider.org/nvidia-h200-new-matrix-empty-beijing-office-commerce-approval-2026/
- The Verge, relaying The New York Times findings on New Matrix and the H200 approvals (7–8 November 2026)
- Unbiased Headlines, "Commerce Licensed About Two Dozen Chinese Firms to Handle Nvidia H200 Chips, Some With Empty Offices, New York Times Finds" (7 November 2026): https://unbiasedheadlines.com/article/commerce-licensed-about-two-dozen-chinese-firms-to-handle-nvidia-h200-chips-some
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