By gamersnexus.net
Publication Date: 2025-12-14 00:46:00
Acquiring “Illegal” GPUs in China
In China, it’s not an illegal market — it’s just a market.
We spoke to everyone about this NVIDIA AI GPU black market: We found middlemen who connect buyers and suppliers, users who can understand the demand and explain it, using the most dystopian definition of wealth — how many GPUs one has.
We also found independent repair shops who, simply doing their jobs, salvage valuable silicon components from dead PCBs of banned GPUs, innovatively hand-modifying them to be better than and have more VRAM than NVIDIA’s own official product SKUs. These shops are not explicitly a part of any “black market,” they’re just repair shops that happen to sometimes work on export-controlled GPUs.
We met multiple people who, when asked the same question, gave the same passcode-like Chinese idiomatic expression, or chengyu (成语), which translates to “open one eye, close one eye.” In other words, it means, “to turn a blind eye.” We heard this saying so much that we made a T-shirt based on it to help fund this investigative report.
“There’s a new kind of black market, and it’s high-end AI GPUs. This particular black market is worth billions of dollars a year”
And among others, we even spoke with a US-based Chinese national buying video cards to strip them and ship the GPUs to Chinese companies, which violates US export control law.
One of our viewers was able to meet with a GPU smuggler, whom…
