Nvidia, the American chipmaking giant that’s faced restrictions over the sale of its advanced AI chips to China over fears they could be used against the U.S., has been advertising “compute” partnerships on its website with companies closely linked to the Chinese government, Forbes has learned.
One of those companies is ZTE, a telecom company that is partly owned by the Chinese government and has for years been subject to U.S. restrictions because of its ties to the Chinese military. In 2017, ZTE pled guilty to violating US sanctions on Iran and misleading regulators about it. In 2020, the FCC designated ZTE as a threat to U.S. national security, claiming the company, along with Huawei, “posed a unique threat to the security and integrity of the nation’s communications networks and communications supply chain.” In 2021, the company was added to the commission’s “Covered List,” and in 2022, the FCC voted to ban sales of new ZTE products in the U.S. The company is currently under FCC investigation for potential evasion of that ban.
Nvidia’s website lists 129 Chinese partners, split into three tiers: registered, preferred, and elite. ZTE is listed as elite. “Elite partners represent the deepest level of partnership with Nvidia and demonstrate the highest level of commitment to the partnership,” the website says.
Also listed among the company’s “elite” partners are Beijing Advanced Digital Technology (Adtec) Ltd, a data storage and financial products firm that serves sanctioned firms including Inspur and Huawei, and SinoInfo Co. Ltd., which is a project of the China Credit Reference Center, a state-owned entity that tracks Chinese citizens’ financial and employment history. The Nvidia website says the partnerships are about “networking” and “compute.”
Current U.S. laws and regulations do not prevent Nvidia from partnering with ZTE, Adtec and SinoInfo, though they may restrict the U.S. firm from selling specific chips to those partners. When asked about the partnerships, Nvidia spokesperson Patrick Rutherford said in a statement: “The regulatory landscape does not allow us to offer a competitive datacenter GPU in China, leaving that massive market to our rapidly growing foreign competitors. We do not include that market in our forecast.”
“When we were able to supply the market, we followed the government’s direction on which companies were restricted. We worked only with approved partners for commercial, non-military uses.”
ZTE, Beijing Adtec, and SinoInfo did not respond to requests for comment.
Nvidia has sold a slower version of its AI chip called the H20 to Chinese firms for years, which it developed in part because of U.S. export restrictions. But earlier this year, President Donald Trump banned it from selling any of its semiconductors to firms in China, then reversed course to resume sales of the H20 under the condition the U.S. government gets a 15% cut of its revenue. The most advanced chips are still blocked from sale. On Thursday, the White House urged legislators to oppose a bill that would require Nvidia and other chipmakers to prioritize American customers before selling to companies in China and other foreign adversaries.
Despite U.S. export controls, Chinese firms have used obscure networks of subsidiaries and rental agreements to circumvent U.S. government bans and obtain chips. (Just this week, four men — one of whom was the CEO of a company that identified itself as an “Nvidia cloud partner” — were indicted for illegally selling Nvidia chips to Chinese companies in violation of federal licensure laws.) Moreover, the Chinese military has continued to try to purchase Nvidia chips, despite laws intended to stop it from doing so. Last week, the Financial Times reported that a U.S. government memo claimed the Chinese tech giant Alibaba — with which Nvidia recently announced a growing partnership — was helping the Chinese military target the United States. (Alibaba denied the claims.)
Demand for Nvidia’s chips has made it the most valuable company in the world today. In the last financial year, China represented 13% of revenue, or $17 billion; Nvidia said in its November earnings it had only generated $50 million in H20 sales since the April ban on exports was lifted. Its Q3 revenues for China in 2025 are just $3 billion, a 63% drop from $8 billion in Q3 2024.
Chinese companies are still ravenous for the company’s chips, despite the Chinese government’s attempts to discourage them from buying (ironically due to similar concerns about backdoors that the U.S. government fears about ZTE and Huawei). Still, the company says it continues to rely on Chinese and Taiwanese partners, which “comprise a significant portion of our revenue and where we have suppliers, contract manufacturers, and assembly partners who are critical to our supply continuity.”
Nvidia is not the only U.S. tech giant that has advertised partnerships with companies close to the Chinese government. Earlier this year, Intel’s website touted relationships with three sanctioned Chinese companies — Uniview, Hikvision and Cloudwalk. After Forbes reported on the partnerships, Intel removed them from its website and said it had “no current business relationships” with the firms.