Shanghai startup gains Nvidia partner status weeks after US chip restrictions

A Shanghai company, Century Litong, gained Nvidia's Preferred Cloud Partner status in October 2023, just two weeks after the US expanded chip export restrictions on China. The firm was only four months old at the time. An investigation by The Information linked the company's ownership to Alice Huang's family and a wider network handling over $7.5 billion in Nvidia GPU imports. The network reportedly moved around 240,000 restricted chips into China, including H100 and H200 processors. Century Litong secured large quantities of existing distributor inventory, which remained sellable after the restrictions took effect. The ownership connections do not by themselves prove violations of US export rules.