At least seven Chinese universities with ties to the country’s military are seeking access to Nvidia’s H200 processors — the most powerful AI chips the US has permitted to be sold in China — according to a review of procurement records reported by The New York Times on June 1. Two of the institutions, Beihang University and Northwestern Polytechnical University, belong to China’s “Seven Sons of National Defense,” an elite cluster of research universities formally dedicated to supporting the People’s Liberation Army. Both are on the US Commerce Department’s Entity List, meaning American companies are generally prohibited from supplying them technology without a license. Separately, the PLA Air Force Medical University in Xi’an issued a tender for eight H200 chips to train a large language model for medical AI and biosurveillance research, while Beihang’s School of Cyberspace Security sought to rent H200-level computing time — a workaround that Reuters found is increasingly common, allowing Chinese entities to access restricted hardware without a direct import.
The procurement activity surfaces weeks after the Trump administration reversed some H200 export restrictions in May 2026, clearing roughly ten Chinese technology companies — including Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance — to purchase up to 75,000 units each, subject to end-use conditions. The findings illustrate the enforcement gap at the center of Washington’s chip policy debate: civilian sales approvals offer limited control over how computing access migrates through China’s sprawling university-military-industrial complex. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has argued that tighter controls only accelerate Beijing’s domestic semiconductor ambitions, while congressional critics counter that H200 access gives the PLA a meaningful boost in AI-enabled military applications. No deliveries under the Trump-era approval have yet been made, with the deal still held up by ongoing US-China trade negotiations and Beijing’s new outbound-investment regulations.