Tens of Nvidia B300 GPUs have been identified powering workloads in China, despite the Blackwell Ultra hardware being subject to export restrictions.

According to findings from Israeli data center security firm Lava, some 32 B300s geolocated in China were uncovered via exposed monitoring endpoints. Lava staff suggests the GPUs were “part of a much larger inventory” – a stark finding considering such high-end chips are barred from being shipped to China by the US Department of Commerce.

Some 4,724 unique Nvidia GPUs were identified by Lava, though the security firm did stress that IP geolocation is not definitive given users could be employing a virtual private network or proxy server relaying traffic through an address in China, with the hardware physically located elsewhere.

The Information, which first picked up the report, suggests the B300s Lava identified were being used by state-owned carrier China Telecom. Lava’s report doesn’t explicitly state who is using the hardware, but that observed exposures spanned GPU clouds, hosting networks, telecom, and research environments.

The US imposed stringent export restrictions on shipments of chips to China to hamper AI development in the rival superpower over national security concerns.

That hasn’t stopped Chinese developers from making use of hobbled hardware and RTX GPUs designed for gaming to power AI development efforts, with DeepSeek’s apparent reliance on outdated Nvidia hardware causing shockwaves upon its initial release.

Export restrictions have also been repeatedly skirted, including some $1 billion worth of Nvidia B200s and other high-end hardware into China in the wake of the Trump administration’s ban on exports of the China market-specific H20 GPUs last spring.

Lava’s report also identified 1,156 worth of RTX 4090 GPUs, consumer graphics cards also subject to restrictions.

“Across our original global sample, approximately half of the GPUs identified through exposed monitoring systems were consumer or workstation-class models, highlighting their substantial presence in the infrastructure visible through our research,” the report suggests.

Lava’s report on chips being found somewhere they shouldn’t be was aptly timed after protesters disrupted Nvidia’s GTC keynote in Berlin last week over chips being found in Russian drones in Ukraine.

Greenpeace activists interrupted Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang early in the keynote and were quickly ushered out, and their banner, which read “Nvidia, clean up your dirty business,” was confiscated. As they were being escorted out, the CEO said he would “talk to you guys later” and that the points they raised were “all important issues, but let me get through my keynote.”

Greenpeace told SDxCentral after the event in Berlin that campaigners again tried to approach Huang as he was leaving the venue, but “he kept moving.”

“We plan to send him a follow-up message requesting a meeting, building on his call for dialogue during his presentation,” a Greenpeace spokesperson told this title.