Chinese University Bought Two Nvidia H200 Chips

Northwestern Polytechnical University bought two Nvidia H200 artificial intelligence chips for 874,700 yuan, about $123,000, according to an October 21 procurement notice, while remaining subject to U.S. export restrictions. The university also awarded five contracts this year for rented access to H200 and other advanced Nvidia computing capacity, procurement records show.

The purchase was made for the university’s management school through Shaanxi Bosuan Network Technology, a Chinese supplier. The notice records the transaction but does not establish whether the chips were delivered or how they reached the supplier or buyer.

In January, the university’s cybersecurity school awarded two seven-month contracts for access to servers containing eight H200 chips each. The contracts covered AI model fine-tuning and reinforcement-learning training. Other records show rentals involving eight Nvidia A100 chips and eight A800 chips. In April, another university institute contracted for computing services requiring at least 24 A100 chips for structural and fluid-dynamics simulations.

The procurement documents do not identify the rented servers’ locations or the processors’ origins. They...