(Oct 2): A Chinese financing company owned by several local government entities has funded the purchase of restricted Nvidia Corp chips, according to documents filed with Beijing regulators, suggesting state support for an illicit trade that Washington worries is fuelling China’s artificial intelligence (AI) progress.
Over the past year, Semi-Tech Leasing Group Co has provided capital to another company called Glory View Technology Co for the purchase of more than 700 servers, the documents showed. One contract identifies funding for 32 units of Asustek Computer Inc servers equipped with Nvidia’s B300 chips, bought from a separate Chinese company about which little public information is available.
The regulatory filings give a glimpse into a trade that US President Donald Trump has made clear he doesn’t want to see happen and years of Washington restrictions have sought to prevent. The B300 is part of Nvidia’s powerful Blackwell family of products, and US regulations forbid their sale to China absent an explicit licence.
But the rules have failed to entirely stop the movement of those prized semiconductors. Government authorities have alleged that black-market brokers have smuggled into China billions of dollars worth of Nvidia hardware, including Blackwell chips — exploiting what some US officials see as glaring gaps in corporate due diligence and weak government enforcement.
An order of 32 servers — model name XA NB3I-E12 — is small. While hundreds of other servers that Semi-Tech Leasing purchased match the specifications for Nvidia Blackwell chips, the documents don’t explicitly identify the hardware in question. Still, the records point to a key dynamic of the illicit trade: the Chinese government, at least in this instance, has helped make it happen.
The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology in Beijing didn’t respond to a faxed request for comments. Semi-Tech Leasing and Glory View also didn’t answer queries.
Nvidia said it is “looking into this report and will work with our OEM (original equipment manufacturer) customer to investigate”, a reference to so-called original equipment manufacturers like Asus that buy Nvidia chips and assemble them into servers. Asus said in a statement that the company “is committed to strict compliance with all applicable laws and regulations, including export controls”.
Semi-Tech Leasing, which in June changed its name from Sino IC Leasing Co, was set up in 2015 by the China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund — colloquially known as the Big Fund — to provide financial support to the semiconductor industry. After the Big Fund sold most of its shares in 2020, local governments in Shenzhen, Beijing and other provinces have jointly controlled most of Semi-Tech Leasing’s shares, according to Chinese company registry information.
In recent years, Semi-Tech Leasing has expanded its remit to data centre infrastructure and deployed more than 11 billion yuan (US$1.6 billion or RM6.7 billion) to “create an ecosystem encompassing model training, chips and other aspects of the AI industry”, the company’s chairman said at an April financial conference in Shanghai, according to local reports. Semi-Tech Leasing, he added, “spares no effort in serving and supporting national strategy”.
The exact content of that support is fairly opaque, given that Semi-Tech Leasing is not publicly traded and doesn’t need to disclose how it spends its money. But Chinese companies are legally required to provide certain details of financing contracts to a database maintained by the credit agency of the People’s Bank of China. Semi-Tech Leasing submitted documents, which Bloomberg News reviewed, that detailed financing with Glory View and its Shenzhen subsidiary.
Glory View is a publicly traded company that used to be a smart city solutions provider but in the past couple years has expanded into AI data centre business. Glory View’s stock price has risen by about 230% so far this year on the back of sterling profit growth from its AI ventures.
In August 2025, Glory View signed the first of a dozen contracts with Semi-Tech Leasing, a so-called finance lease with Glory View receiving a loan from Semi-Tech Leasing. Under this arrangement, Glory View in effect borrowed 401 million yuan o buy 171 servers and would repay the money over a duration of 63 months.
The companies engaged in similar transactions through May of this year, the cache of documents shows, with Glory View and its subsidiary borrowing more than three billion yuan from Semi-Tech Leasing for more than 700 servers. With the exception of the 32 servers identified as Asus hardware, it’s unclear what chips these servers contained.
Of that stockpile, the majority of servers — including the 32 Blackwell systems — were recorded to be installed at a data centre park developed by China Mobile Ltd in Zhongwei, Ningxia, a city located at the edge of Gobi desert. Zhongwei is one of China’s officially designated national computing clusters, aimed at boosting the country’s AI data centre buildout, according to a recent report by BNEF. China Mobile didn’t respond to a request for comments.
Bloomberg originally viewed these documents in May and June. In late June, Semi-Tech Leasing resubmitted redacted versions of all the documents, removing sensitive information such as server model names and specification requirements — which is how the 32 Blackwell servers could be identified — as well as the names of its suppliers and location of its hardware.
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