A thriving repair industry for Nvidia AI chips is taking shape in China, despite a US export ban that was supposed to keep these components out of the country.
According to a recent Reuters report, at least a dozen companies in Shenzhen now offer repair services for Nvidia’s high-end AI hardware, including the H100 and A100 chips.
One company with 15 years of experience fixing gaming GPUs expanded into AI chip repair in late 2024, launching a new business that services up to 500 Nvidia chips per month. Their facility includes a test area with 256 servers to simulate datacenter conditions. Another firm, which previously rented out GPUs, now repairs as many as 200 chips each month, charging about 10 percent of the chip’s original sale price per repair.
Black market demand for Nvidia chips
The surge in demand is largely due to the heavy usage of these chips. Industry sources say many H100 and A100 GPUs in China have been running nonstop for years, leading to high failure rates. Since Nvidia is barred from providing warranty or repair services for these restricted products in China, only authorized partners are officially allowed to handle repairs – otherwise, using the chips makes no technical or economic sense, according to an Nvidia spokesperson.
The scale of the repair business suggests that smuggling of Nvidia chips into China remains widespread. For over a year, reports have described a booming black market for Nvidia hardware, and many new datacenters in China are still being outfitted with these banned chips.
Lawmakers in the US from both parties have proposed legislation to make chip tracking mandatory. The Trump administration also supports these efforts, but recently lifted export restrictions on the H20 chip originally developed for the Chinese market. While the H20 is designed for AI applications, it is less effective for training large AI models. As a result, demand for Nvidia’s latest accelerators like the B200 is growing on China’s black market.
