- AI -chip repair companies in China bloom through heavy demand current
- Placed GPUs Fuel A flowering underground repair market in the middle of the US export restrictions
- Chinese stores simulate data centers and repair hundreds of chips monthly to scale
A quiet but growing company has emerged in China that focuses on repairing the advanced AI chips from Nvidia, despite strict export checks of the US.
Reports of Reuters Found around a dozen small companies, mainly located in Shenzhen, claiming that they serve a large numbers of H100 and A100 GPUs, although these chips were officially banned from sale to China in 2022.
One company told the news agency that it repairs to 500 NVIDIA AI chips every month – and with around 12 similar companies that work all year round, that could be on tens of thousands of chips per year.
Significant question
Many of these units are worn out of heavy use, especially since some have been driving around the clock for years in AI training workload.
“There is really a significant recovery question,” Reuters was told by the co-owner of a Shenzhen company that moved to AI-hardware at the end of 2024.
That question led to the creation of a second company purely to handle AI chip repair.
Their facility includes a server room that can simulate data center conditions with a maximum of 256 servers.
Another store that shifted from GPU rental to repairs told Reuters It dissolves around 200 chips per month and usually charges around 10% of the original purchase price.
Repairs may include fan replacement, printed plate fixes, memorial diagnostics and software tests.
NVIDIA cannot legally support or replace limited GPUs in China. A spokesperson for Nvidia said that only the company and the approved partners are authorized to offer the necessary service and support, and added that performing limited chips without full infrastructure is not viable in the long term.
The potentially high failure percentage calls for concern about what will happen with tens of thousands of aging A100s and earlier GPUs as soon as they fail.
The existence of such a repair sector is due to the widespread smuggling of forbidden chips in China, something we have previously reported.
While Nvidia recently started offering the H20 GPU in China to meet export restrictions, many customers still prefer the forbidden H100 for training LLMS.
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