Even though the US restricted exports of Nvidia’s high-performance A100 and H100 GPUs to China in October 2022, these cards are still very easily available there. What’s more surprising is that they are even cheaper to rent in China than in the US.
According to a Financial Times report, several small Chinese cloud providers are renting out servers packed with Nvidia’s A100 GPUs at a fraction of the cost compared to the US.
We’re talking discounts of up to 40%, with these companies charging around $6 per hour for a server with eight A100s. Meanwhile, similar services in the US can set you back $10 per hour.
So, how’s China pulling this off? The answer most likely lies in a thriving black market fueled by smuggled Nvidia GPUs. The US export restrictions haven’t stopped the A100 from popping up readily on Chinese online marketplaces like Taobao and Xiaohongshu.
Financial Times reports that the prices are also only slightly marked up compared to those outside China. At Shenzhen’s Huaqiangbei electronics market, H100 GPUs for AI and high-performance computing are priced between $23,000 and $30,000. This is only slightly above Nvidia’s official price range of $20,000 to $23,000 for these GPUs.

However, it’s only the small vendors in China that are offering competitive prices using smuggled Nvidia GPUs. Big players like Alibaa and ByteDance are said to be relying on officially sourced GPUs and charge significantly more—often double or quadruple what smaller firms offer.
These larger players do provide discounts, though, bringing their prices closer to Amazon Web Services (AWS), which charges $15 to $32 per hour.
Nevertheless, the abundance of A100s (and their newer cousin, the H100) in China points to a well-oiled smuggling operation bypassing US regulations. Companies might be setting up dummy entities in other countries such as Japan, Malaysia, and Indonesia to snag these GPUs and then ship them back to China.
When questioned about the matter by Financial Times, Nvidia says it sold its processors to well-known partners “who comply with US export control rules”. However, the company added they “cannot track products after they are sold.”