A Chinese artificial intelligence company has managed to gain access to 2,300 Nvidia Blackwell chips through a cloud arrangement in Indonesia, even though President Donald Trump has already made it clear earlier this month that Nvidia should not be selling its high-end AI chips to China.
This entire operation, revealed by The Wall Street Journal, runs through multiple countries and loopholes, but no part of it technically breaks U.S. export laws.
The chips are installed inside a windowless data center tucked between a private school and an apartment complex in Jakarta. They were purchased by Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison, an Indonesian telecom provider.
Indosat spent roughly $100 million to buy 32 GB200 racks from Aivres, a server-building company based in Silicon Valley. Each rack holds 72 Nvidia Blackwell chips, all of which are now lined up to serve a Shanghai-based firm called INF Tech.
Indonesian telco acts as middleman for Chinese AI firm
The first leg of this deal started when Nvidia sold the chips to Aivres, which isn’t a random reseller.
The company is one-third owned by Inspur, a Chinese tech company that landed on the U.S. government’s national-security trade blacklist in 2023 for military supercomputing involvement.
The blacklist blocks Nvidia from working directly with Inspur or its known blacklisted subsidiaries, but Aivres, being an American company, isn’t included in the ban.
So Nvidia did what it’s legally allowed to do. Its compliance team cleared the sale, and Aivres went ahead and closed a deal with Indosat in mid‑2024. That contract guaranteed the delivery of the server racks packed with the Blackwell chips.
But Indosat only agreed to the purchase after a client was lined up, and that client was INF Tech, an AI startup in China founded in 2021 by Qi Yuan, a professor at Fudan University and a former machine-learning scientist at Alibaba. Qi, who holds a Ph.D. from MIT, is also a U.S. citizen.
Qi wasn’t alone during the negotiations. People from Fudan University were reportedly part of the talks, though INF officially signed the agreement for the cloud computing contract.
Once the servers were delivered in October, they began being set up inside the Indonesian facility. Once operational, they’ll be used to train models for financial AI tools and health research, such as drug discovery.
Legal but controversial workaround fuels AI race
There’s no law saying Chinese companies can’t rent cloud computing services abroad. Lawyers who understand U.S. export rules said that, unless the hardware is being used for military intelligence or weapons, this kind of set-up fits inside the current regulations that were enforced under Trump’s administration.
Still, some U.S. officials aren’t thrilled about it.
Critics say it’s easy for commercial projects in China to get repurposed into military use through Beijing’s civil-military fusion policy. That’s exactly why the Biden administration, before leaving office, drafted a new export-control rule targeting countries like Indonesia—which aren’t on the U.S.’s close allies list.
The rule would’ve forced U.S. companies to reveal who was buying chips, why they were buying them, and whether the end user was tied to a restricted entity.
But when Trump returned to the White House, he made it clear his administration would not enforce that rule. That decision moved responsibility to companies like Nvidia to conduct their own risk checks.
Thea Kendler, a former export-control official under Biden, said plainly: “The government is pushing it on the companies to do their own due diligence.”
INF expands regionally, Indosat denies Chinese access
INF Tech has said it does not engage in military-related research and complies with U.S. law. The company now wants to grow outside China, tapping into partnerships with data centers in Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand to build up its AI infrastructure.
On its official website, it describes its AI focus as being targeted at financial services and healthcare applications.
Vikram Sinha, who runs Indosat, was asked if the company had Chinese clients. He said Indosat serves multinational firms, and every client, whether American or Chinese, must go through the same approval processes. “Any customer which is outside Indonesia goes through the same regulation, whether it is a U.S. company or a China company. If it clears all the regulations, we support it,” Vikram said.
Indosat also clarified that INF Tech has no physical access to the hardware in Jakarta. They only rent processing power. The goal, they said, is to use this infrastructure to power AI products tailored for Indonesia and Southeast Asia.
Even with that claim, the fact remains that China is still benefiting from U.S. technology despite being locked out of direct purchases.
Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s CEO, admitted that the company’s China market share has plummeted to zero from 95% because of the U.S. export ban. Still, Chinese firms keep finding ways to get what they want.
Sometimes it’s through middlemen. Sometimes it’s by renting servers like this. Other times, they’ve even moved data using suitcases packed with hard drives, a practice seen before in Malaysia and Australia.
An Nvidia spokesman defended the company’s position, saying: “We support the Trump administration’s vision to secure U.S. AI leadership and create American jobs. The Biden controls cost taxpayers tens of billions, crippled innovation and ceded ground to foreign rivals.”
Vivien Lin, Chief Product Officer at BingX, made it clear how important this kind of AI computing has become in the world of crypto and finance. “The future of trading’s going to come down to how well people and machines work together. AI’s not here to replace our gut or experience; it’ll sharpen them, help us spot patterns quicker, and make clearer calls. The real game-changer is how we choose to use these tools to make smarter, more confident moves.”
Whether or not Washington will tighten the leash again, the chips are already humming. The cloud is now China’s back door to American AI power, and no one is pretending otherwise.
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This articles is written by : Nermeen Nabil Khear Abdelmalak
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