- AI -Chiprepreparations Company in China thrive due to high demand
- Smuggled GPUs fuel A flowering underground repair market in the midst of US export restrictions
- Chinese stores simulate data centers and fasten hundreds of chips monthly in scale
A quiet but growing business has emerged in China, focusing on repairing Nvidia’s advanced AI chips despite strict US export control.
Reports from Pakinomist Found around a dozen small businesses, mainly based in Shenzhen, and claims they serve a large number of NVIDIA’s H100 and A100 GPUs, though these chips were officially banned from sales to China by 2022.
A company told the news agency that it is repairing up to 500 NVIDIA AI chips every month – and with about 12 similar companies operating year -round, it can be tens of thousands of chips annually.
Significant demand
Many of these devices are worn out from strong use, especially as some have been driving around the clock for years in AI training workloads.
“There is really significant demand for repair,” Pakinomist was told by the co-owner of a Shenzhen company that moved into AI-Hardware at the end of 2024.
This demand led to the creation of another company clean to deal with AI chipreparation.
Their facility includes a server room that can simulate data center ratios with up to 256 servers.
Another store that switched from GPU -House Tenefores to Repairs Telled Pakinomist It solves about 200 chips per Month and typically charges approx. 10% of the original purchase price.
Repairs may include fan replacement, circulatory card, memory diagnostics and software tests.
Nvidia cannot legal support or replace limited GPUs in China. A Nvidia spokesman said that only the company and approved partners are authorized to offer the necessary service and support, adding that running limited chips without full infrastructure is not viable in the long term.
The potentially high error rate raises concerns about what will happen to tens of thousands of aging A100S and former GPUs when they fail.
The existence of such a repair sector is down to the widespread smuggling of banned chips in China, something we have reported in the past.
While Nvidia recently began offering the H20 GPU in China to comply with export restrictions, many customers still prefer the banned H100 for training LLMs.
