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Mass smuggling of up to 1.5 million Nvidia AI GPUs could be the underlying cause of Jensen Huang's departure, analysts claim
Hardware smuggling to China could be the reason why Jensen had to leave the company he co-founded.
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Leading semiconductor research firm SemiAnalysis believes that Jensen Huang's sudden departure from Nvidia may have been driven not only by revelations about his personal extramarital relationships, but also by widespread illicit exports of advanced AI accelerators to China. In its latest newsletter, analysts estimate that more than 1.5 gigawatts (GW) worth of restricted Nvidia hardware, which could be equivalent to up to 1.5 million GPUs, has reached the country despite U.S. export controls.
Over 1.5 GW of Nvidia hardware subject to U.S. export restrictions ultimately ended up in China in recent years, according to SemiAnalysis' Accelerator Model, which tracks AI accelerator production and destinations. The estimate excludes processors that Nvidia specifically developed to comply with U.S. export rules, such as the H20 or H800. The firm also claims that the U.S. Department of Commerce has reached a similar conclusion about the scale of unauthorized shipments. Yet, SemiAnalysis does not disclose the exact number of accelerators shipped to China illegally, or their split between Nvidia's product generations.
The scale of the alleged diversions is particularly notable because modern AI accelerators require substantial power and infrastructure. While the report does not explain how it converts accelerator quantities into power figures, it is likely that the company uses package-level nameplate/rated power multiplied by the number of GPUs. Assuming that all of these AI GPUs were Nvidia H200 SXM rated for up to 700W, then China got around 2.142 million of such accelerators, while if all of these processors were B200 SXM rated for up to 1,000W, then we are talking about 1.5 million units. For a mixed deployment, the total would fall between these figures, depending on the proportion of H200 and B200 accelerators. To put these numbers into context, xAI's Colossus One had 220-230,000 Hopper H100 and H200 GPUs, whereas the Colossus 2 has a target of 1.2 million Blackwell B200 and B300 GPUs. That said, 1.5 GW of restricted Nvidia hardware in China represents an enormous amount of computing infrastructure, which is comparable, or even exceeds, the scale of xAI's entire existing Colossus operation.
While SemiAnalysis did not reveal all the cases in which restricted AI accelerators reached the People's Republic of China, it supports its assessment with two well-known cases of alleged GPU smuggling. The first involves Supermicro co-founder Wally Liaw, Taiwan sales executive Steven Chang, and contractor Willy Sun, who were charged in March 2026. According to the indictment, approximately $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 that the defendants used substitute servers and transferred identification labels to conceal the actual destinations of the hardware during audits.
The second case involves nine individuals associated with Nvidia, Albatron, Chief Telecom, Flying Tiger, and Supermicro in Taiwan. The authorities accuse the group of arranging unauthorized exports of 130 Nvidia B300-based servers, 74 of which eventually reached China. The suspects used shell companies, forged documents, and declared Japan as the destination for servers that were actually bound for China, according to prosecutors. Taiwanese authorities discovered the operation during a drug smuggling investigation. Both cases are still before the courts.
Amidst the ongoing fallout and reports into Jensen's Huang's extramarital affair with Alice Huang, an alleged Chinese intelligence asset who was an executive at Megaspeed, one report claims that Ms. Huang was personally responsible for facilitating the smuggling of $7.5 billion