NVIDIA's AI chips are commanding insane premiums on China's black market, with prices doubling over the past six months. A DGX B300 server packed with eight Blackwell GPUs now goes for over 8 million yuan (roughly $1.1 million) — nearly three times its $400,000 US retail price. Even individual workstation chips like the RTX 6000 Pro, used for deploying large language models, have jumped from 50,000 yuan to 130,000 yuan since the start of the year.
The price spike is a direct result of tightening gray-market channels. Late last year, the US government ramped up investigations into unauthorized exports, while Taiwan and Malaysia launched crackdowns on transshipment smuggling. In March, a Supermicro co-founder and others were charged with smuggling $2.5 billion worth of NVIDIA AI servers to Chinese customers — the largest AI chip smuggling case ever brought by US authorities. (Supermicro says it complies with export regulations.)
To cope with the shortage, Chinese buyers are broadening their shopping list, picking up modifiable gaming chips and older A100s — pushing A100 server prices as high as 600,000 yuan. And here's a twist: even though the US has approved some Chinese companies to purchase H200 chips, China's customs has effectively banned their entry to force adoption of homegrown alternatives like Huawei's Ascend 950PR.
Most deals now go down in Hong Kong, where banned chips are stuffed into compliant servers and shipped across the border. NVIDIA has warned that cobbling together smuggled gear for data centers is a 'dead end,' and it refuses to service or support any unauthorized products.
The supply crunch, combined with surging memory chip prices, has sent AI computing rental costs soaring in China. Two years ago, renting GPUs in China was generally cheaper than in the US. Now, prices are on par — and for cutting-edge Blackwell-based systems, Chinese renters are paying even more than their American counterparts.