Procurement Notices Detail Four Nvidia H200 Cards at Blacklisted NWPU

Reuters reported on November 11, 2026 that Northwestern Polytechnical University bought Nvidia H200 chips and rented access to Nvidia-powered servers despite being on the U.S. export-control Entity List. Its review of 26 Chinese procurement and corporate records found universities buying U.S.-restricted Nvidia chips or renting Nvidia-powered computing through domestic suppliers.

The most recent management school award notice, dated October 21, 2026, lists two NVIDIA H200 141G PCIe data-center AI accelerator cards for 874,700 yuan, supplied by Shaanxi Bosuan Network Technology rather than directly by Nvidia. A separate cybersecurity school notice dated September 4, 2026 lists two more H200 cards for 796,000 yuan. The H200 is used to train and run advanced AI systems, and exports to China require U.S. licensing approval.

The Xi’an-based university conducts research related to military aircraft, missiles and satellites and belongs to China’s Seven Sons of National Defense group of defense-focused universities.

Rented Access Alongside the Purchases

The university also obtained computing without buying the underlying hardware. Two January 28, 2026 awards from its cybersecurity school covered separate NVIDIA HGX H200 eight-GPU systems: a 441,000-yuan reinforcement-learning fine-tuning service running from February 16, 2026 through September 16, 2026, and a 441,700-yuan multitask fine-tuning service running from February 1, 2026 through August 31, 2026. Both specified 141GB of memory per GPU. These contracts supplied server capacity rather than additional H200 cards.

Two other January 28, 2026 awards covered a server with eight Nvidia A800 80GB GPUs for training-data processing, costing 240,000 yuan for 12 months, and a server with eight A100 SXM4 80GB GPUs for model inference, costing 471,600 yuan for 12 months. The A100 and A800 are barred from export to all Chinese entities. In April 2026, another university institute agreed to pay 375,000 yuan for computing services requiring at least 24 A100 chips for structural and fluid-dynamics simulations.

Entity List Restrictions Remained in Force

A January 2026 licensing change for some H200 exports did not remove the university’s separate restrictions. Northwestern Polytechnical University was added to the Entity List, the Commerce Department’s trade blacklist, on May 14, 2001; since September 20, 2016, a license has been required to export, reexport or transfer any item subject to the Export Administration Regulations to the university, according to a Bureau of Industry and Security enforcement order. Restrictions were tightened in 2019, making licenses for controlled U.S. technology exports to the university subject to denial in most circumstances.

The January 15, 2026 rule moved qualifying exports from the United States of H200 and equivalent chips to end users in China or Macau from a presumption of denial to case-by-case review. Applicants must certify sufficient U.S. supply and no diversion of global foundry capacity that would otherwise serve U.S. customers, arrange independent third-party testing in the United States, and document customer screening and physical security. They must also confirm that the commodities are not for military or military-intelligence end uses or users, that no transaction party is covered by the Entity List provision, and that restricted parties will not receive remote access. The revised route therefore does not override the university’s Entity List restrictions.

A Wider Domestic Market

The review also identified purchases at other institutions. Shenzhen University bought three H100 processors for 769,800 yuan in September 2026, and Beihang University bought four A800 processors for 489,000 yuan in April 2026. Beihang also belongs to the Seven Sons group and has close ties to China’s aerospace and defense industries.

Chinese public-procurement rules require agencies to verify that suppliers can fulfill orders before announcing winning bidders and signing contracts. The records nevertheless offered little information about where the processors originated or where the rented servers operated. They establish purchases and contractual access while leaving the chips’ upstream supply chain and any specific export violation unresolved.

The disclosure comes as Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang has said continued U.S. sales to China would preserve American technological leadership and keep Chinese customers reliant on U.S. technology. Lawmakers in both parties have urged stronger controls, including chip-tracking requirements and greater congressional oversight of exports. The records make the enforcement challenge a domestic-market problem as much as a border-control one: restricting licensed exports does not by itself prevent a blacklisted institution from acquiring AI accelerators or renting their computing capacity through Chinese suppliers.