Nvidia B300 chips on China Telecom's network? What Lava's GPU scan found, and what it doesn't prove

Nvidia B300 chips were reported on China Telecom's network on October 22, 2026, in a briefing from The Information about research by security company Lava. Lava's own post, published the same day, says it identified 32 Nvidia B300 GPUs reporting through internet-exposed monitoring endpoints on IP addresses geolocated to China. The B300 is a top-end Blackwell Ultra data-center chip that US export controls keep out of China. But the post doesn't name China Telecom or any other operator, and Lava writes that the finding "does not establish that any export-control violation occurred." It's the latest in a run of reports about B300s reaching China, after Taiwan's indictments over 130 B300 servers.

This story is based on Lava's October 22 and October 8, 2026 research posts, The Information's October 22 briefing as summarized by Techmeme and Tom's Hardware, Nvidia's statement to Tom's Hardware, the Commerce Department's January 15, 2026 rule in the Federal Register, and Reuters' and Bloomberg's earlier reporting on B300s in China, checked October 23, 2026.

The short version

• What Lava found: 32 GPUs that reported their model as "B300 SXM6 AC" through endpoints on IP addresses geolocated to China.
• How: Nvidia's DCGM Exporter, a GPU monitoring tool, was reachable on the public internet without authentication and disclosed model names and unique device IDs.
• China Telecom: the link comes from The Information's paywalled briefing, as relayed by Techmeme and Tom's Hardware. Lava's post doesn't name an operator.
• Lava's caveats: IP geolocation "is not definitive," and the finding doesn't establish a violation.
• Nvidia's response: a spokesperson told Tom's Hardware that diversion is "a drop in the bucket" and smuggling "a nonfactor."
• The rules: Nvidia told Reuters in April that the B300 is restricted from sale in China.

What did Lava actually find?

Lava's research, written by co-founder Yakir Kadkoda with Jordan Nanos, comes from scanning for public DCGM Exporter endpoints, which publish GPU metrics over plain HTTP. In its October 8 post on a related vulnerability, CVE-2026-47483, Lava described four scans between March and May 2026 that found about 2,100 exposed hosts and more than 12,000 unique GPUs across nearly 300 organizations.

The October 22 post focuses on endpoints geolocated to China. Lava says it saw 4,724 unique Nvidia GPUs through them, including 374 from the Blackwell generation:

Blackwell-generation Nvidia GPUs Lava saw through China-geolocated endpoints

Unique GPUs, by model reported in DCGM metrics

GeForce RTX 5090152

RTX PRO 5000 72GB112

RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition78

B300 SXM6 AC32

Show the data

Model	GPUs
GeForce RTX 5090	152
RTX PRO 5000 72GB	112
RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition	78
B300 SXM6 AC	32

That's 152 GeForce RTX 5090s, 112 RTX PRO 5000s, 78 RTX PRO 6000 Server Editions and 32 B300s. Lava says about 86% of the 374 Blackwell GPUs were in eight-GPU configurations, but it doesn't say how many servers held the B300s, when it saw them, or where in China they were.

Lava's two posts don't use the same China count: the October 8 post put China at 1,967 GPUs, or 16% of its sample, and the October 22 post cites 4,724 through China-geolocated endpoints. Lava doesn't explain the difference.

Did the B300s sit on China Telecom's network?

That's The Information's report, not Lava's published finding. The Information's October 22 briefing by Qianer Liu is paywalled. Techmeme summarized it as saying that Lava, which it calls an Israeli security company, found the 32 B300s "connected to systems linked to state-owned operator China Telecom," and Tom's Hardware's October 23 report, citing The Information, says the chips were found "within the network of China Telecom." Neither says how the link to China Telecom was established. Lava's post doesn't name China Telecom, any autonomous system number or any other operator.

Lava also flags the main limit of its method. "IP geolocation is not definitive: a proxy, VPN, or tunnel could relay traffic through an address in China," the post says. Seeing a GPU through a Chinese address "does not, by itself, establish that they were exported in violation of regulations."

Nvidia played the report down in a statement to Tom's Hardware, which noted that the company didn't deny the findings. "Governments, researchers, and media have all found insignificant diversion of controlled US products, less than one half of one percent in recent court cases — a drop in the bucket compared to the ocean of domestic compute China already has," a spokesperson said, adding that "this report again demonstrates that smuggling is a nonfactor." No statement from China Telecom or the Commerce Department appears in the sources reviewed.

Why can't Nvidia sell B300s to China?

Nvidia told Reuters in April 2026 that the B300 is restricted from sale in China and that its partners must commit to strict compliance. Reuters reported then that eight-GPU B300 servers were selling for about 7 million yuan, roughly $1 million, in China, against about $550,000 in the US.

The Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security did loosen one part of the rules on January 15, 2026. That rule moved licenses for some advanced chips to China and Macau from a presumption of denial to case-by-case review, but only for chips with a total processing performance below 21,000 and DRAM bandwidth below 6,500 GB/s. Its examples are Nvidia's H200 and AMD's MI325X. The rule doesn't mention Blackwell chips.

The question of which Nvidia hardware Chinese AI developers can use comes up across 9to5AI's coverage, from DeepSeek's DeepInfer engine, which DeepSeek says runs on Nvidia Blackwell and Huawei Ascend, to the US order excluding DeepSeek from federal agencies.

Is this the same as Bloomberg's 32 B300 servers?

Not as far as the sources show. Bloomberg reported on October 1, 2026, citing Chinese regulatory filings, that Semi-Tech Leasing Group, a state-backed lessor, financed more than 700 servers for Glory View Technology, including one transaction that "explicitly funded 32 Asustek Computer Inc. servers" with B300 chips, mostly for a China Mobile computing hub in Ningxia. Nvidia told Bloomberg it was investigating with its manufacturing partners, and Asus said it was committed to export rules.

That report counts 32 servers, and Reuters has reported that each B300 server houses eight GPUs; it also names China Mobile. Lava counts 32 GPUs. No source connects the two.

What's confirmed, reported and uncertain

• Confirmed (Lava's posts): the 32 B300 GPUs and other counts as Lava reports them, the DCGM method, and Lava's caveats.
• Reported (The Information, October 22, via Techmeme and Tom's Hardware): that the B300s were on systems linked to China Telecom.
• Nvidia's statement (to Tom's Hardware, October 23): diversion is "a drop in the bucket" and smuggling "a nonfactor."
• Reported (Reuters, April 30; Bloomberg via Investing.com, October 1): Nvidia's statement that the B300 is restricted in China, Chinese B300 server prices, and the Semi-Tech Leasing financing.
• Uncertain: who operates the B300s, where they physically are, how they got there, and whether any law was broken. China Telecom and Commerce haven't commented publicly in the sources reviewed.