Antonio Bordunovi
Demand is surging in China for a business that, on paper, shouldn’t exist: the repair of advanced Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) artificial intelligence chipsets banned by the U.S. from export to its trade and tech rival, Reuters reported on Friday.
According to two firms in Shenzhen, the country’s tech hub, roughly a dozen boutique companies now specialize in repairing Nvidia’s (NASDAQ:NVDA) H100 GPUs—along with A100 units and other high-end chips—that have somehow entered the country despite restrictions.
“There is really significant repair demand,” said a co-owner of a firm that has been fixing Nvidia’s gaming GPUs for 15 years and began working on AI chips in late 2024.
Business has been so good that the owners created a new company to handle those orders, which now repairs up to 500 Nvidia AI chips per month, the report said.
In related developments, Nvidia’s (NASDAQ:NVDA) AI chips worth $1B were shipped to China in the three months after U.S. President Donald Trump tightened chip export controls, the Financial Times reported on Thursday.