BEIJING, China: Gaps in Washington's efforts to curb China's access to advanced technology have been laid bare after a Chinese university with deep ties to the People's Liberation Army bought Nvidia's powerful H200 AI chips last month despite being on a U.S. export blacklist, procurement records show, Reuters reported.

Northwestern Polytechnical University bought two H200 chips for 874,700 yuan (US$123,000), according to an October 21 procurement record on its website. The record shows the chips were purchased for its management school from Shaanxi Bosuan Network Technology rather than directly from Nvidia.

The H200 is among Nvidia's most capable chips for training and running advanced AI systems and is subject to U.S. export license approvals, which are normally denied for blacklisted institutions such as Northwestern Polytechnical.

Based in the northwestern city of Xian, Northwestern Polytechnical conducts research on military aircraft, missiles, and satellites. It is a member of the "Seven Sons of National Defense" group of Chinese universities under U.S. sanctions. The U.S. Commerce Department added the university to its trade blacklist, known as the Entity List, in 2001 over its alleged involvement in missile-proliferation activities and military research, and tightened the restrictions in 2019.

The university also bought access this year to H200 chips and other powerful Nvidia AI processors through five contracts for rented computing capacity from Chinese companies, procurement records show. Its cybersecurity school awarded two seven-month contracts in January for access to servers containing eight H200 chips each, covering fine-tuning AI models and reinforcement-learning training.

U.S. President Donald Trump's administration began allowing some H200 exports to China on a case-by-case basis in January. But that policy did not lift the separate restrictions applying to Entity List organizations such as Northwestern Polytechnical.

A Reuters review of 26 Chinese procurement and corporate records from this year found universities and research institutions buying U.S.-restricted Nvidia chips or renting access to Nvidia-powered computing services that use such chips through domestic suppliers. Several had close links to China's defense industry or military research.

Shenzhen University bought three H100 processors, another high-end Nvidia AI chip banned by the U.S., for 769,800 yuan in September. Beihang University, another of the Seven Sons of National Defense universities, bought four A800 processors for 489,000 yuan in April.

Northwestern Polytechnical, Nvidia and the U.S. Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security, which oversees export controls, did not respond to requests for comment. The universities named in the records did not respond to requests for comment.

The findings come as Nvidia and its CEO Jensen Huang face mounting scrutiny in Washington over his lobbying for looser restrictions on sales of AI chips to China. Huang has argued that continued U.S. sales to China would preserve American technological leadership and keep Chinese customers reliant on U.S. technology. But some U.S. lawmakers say access to Nvidia's most powerful AI chips could speed China's development of AI systems for weapons design, intelligence analysis, and military modernization.

Both Democrats and Republicans in Congress have urged stronger controls on China's access to advanced AI chips, such as chip-tracking requirements and greater congressional oversight of exports.