Northwestern Polytechnical University bought two Nvidia H200 chips for 874,700 yuan ($123,000) last month, procurement records show, despite being on a US export blacklist. The university also contracted for access to restricted Nvidia chips through Chinese suppliers.
Northwestern Polytechnical University bought two H200 chips for its management school from Chinese supplier Shaanxi Bosuan Network Technology, according to an October 21 procurement record. The H200 is subject to US export licence approvals, which are normally denied for blacklisted institutions such as the university.
The university also awarded two seven-month contracts in January for access to servers containing eight H200 chips each, worth 441,700 yuan and 441,000 yuan. The contracts covered AI model fine-tuning and reinforcement-learning training. Other records show the university rented access to servers containing Nvidia A100 and A800 chips, which are banned from export to Chinese entities.
A review of 26 Chinese procurement and corporate records from this year found universities and research institutions buying US-restricted Nvidia chips or renting access to computing services using them. The records include purchases of H100 chips by Shenzhen University and Wuhan University of Technology, and A800 chips by Beihang University.
