What is being claimed?
Semiconductor research firm SemiAnalysis estimates that over 1.5 gigawatts of Nvidia hardware subject to U.S. export restrictions has reached China in recent years. The firm's Accelerator Model tracks AI accelerator production and destinations. The estimate excludes chips Nvidia specifically developed to comply with U.S. rules, such as the H20 and H800.
SemiAnalysis claims the U.S. Department of Commerce has reached a similar conclusion about the scale of unauthorized shipments. However, the firm does not disclose the exact number of accelerators shipped illegally to China or their split between product generations.
What does 1.5 GW mean?
The report does not explain how it converts accelerator quantities into power figures; it likely uses package-level rated power per GPU. If all chips were H200 SXM units rated at up to 700W, that would mean roughly 2.14 million units; if all were 1,000W B200 SXM chips, about 1.5 million. For a mixed deployment, the total falls between these figures.
For context, xAI's Colossus One has 220,000-230,000 Hopper H100 and H200 GPUs, while Colossus 2 targets 1.2 million Blackwell B200 and B300 GPUs. So 1.5 GW of restricted hardware represents a computing scale comparable to, or even exceeding, xAI's entire existing Colossus operation.
Two concrete cases
SemiAnalysis supports its assessment with two known smuggling cases. In the first, Supermicro co-founder Wally Liaw, Taiwan sales executive Steven Chang and contractor Willy Sun were charged in March 2026. According to the indictment, about $2.5 billion worth of servers were sold to a company in Southeast Asia, with $510 million worth of equipment subsequently diverted to China and obtained by Alibaba. Prosecutors allege the defendants used substitute servers and swapped identification labels to conceal actual destinations during audits.
In the second case, nine individuals linked to Nvidia, Albatron, Chief Telecom, Flying Tiger and Supermicro are accused of arranging unauthorized exports of 130 Nvidia B300-based servers, 74 of which reached China. Suspects allegedly used shell companies, forged documents and declared Japan as the destination for servers actually bound for China. Both cases are still before the courts.
