Jensen Huang, chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., speaks to members of the media in Beijing, China, on Wednesday, July 16, 2025.
Nvidia said Thursday that datacenters built with smuggled chips are a "losing proposition" and that it does not support unauthorized products.
The statement came in response to a Financial Times report that at least $1 billion worth of its artificial intelligence chips illegally entered China.
"Trying to cobble together datacenters from smuggled products is a losing proposition, both technically and economically," a spokesperson said in a statement to CNBC. "Datacenters require service and support, which we provide only to authorized NVIDIA products."
According to the FT report, at least $1 billion worth of the company's chips entered China as President Donald Trump rolled out restrictions on shipments of the company's H20 chips to the world's second-largest economy.
Nvidia's B200 chips, which are prohibited from being sold to China, have become popular on the black market despite restrictions, the Financial Times reported, citing sales contracts, company filings and people familiar with the deals.