The US let Nvidia sell chips to an empty office in China

The New York Times reports that New Matrix, an approved buyer of Nvidia's H200 AI chips, has empty offices and little evidence of real operations, and its owners are tied to a Chinese private equity firm blacklisted by the US since 2024. The report describes this as part of a pattern of firms connected to entities under national-security trade restrictions being cleared to buy Nvidia chips. Nvidia had been restricted from selling chips to China under Biden, but the Trump administration relaxed the limits after Nvidia agreed to give the government a 15-percent cut of all sales.