Chinese AI Projects Worth $3 Billion Rest on Chips Washington Restricts
Reuters' review puts the projects at 23 billion yuan, buildings and power included, as Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick agrees to testify about his department's role in Nvidia's China sales.
Chinese companies, universities and local governments have lined up more than $3 billion of computing projects around Nvidia chips that US rules restrict, Reuters reported, a day after Jensen Huang’s exit as CEO.
Meanwhile, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick alongwith Huang, has also been summoned to testify to the Senate Banking Committee about his department’s role in Nvidia’s China sales.
These two headlines are tightly linked as Commerce reviews those sales, and these projects live or die by what it allows.
What Reuters actually counted: concrete, power and servers
The headline figure is a sum of “combined reported value,” as Reuters puts it, drawn from planned investments, signed contracts and finished installations. It isn’t a chip bill. The itemised projects include:
- Fujian: a proposed 6.2 billion yuan centre on H100 chips
- Shaanxi: 3 billion yuan, H100 and H200
- Jilin: 2.26 billion yuan, H100 plus Chinese chips
- Inner Mongolia: 1.5 billion yuan, 625 H200 servers
- Gansu: a 1.16 billion yuan construction contract awarded in July, for about 3,072 processors
While those five builds account for roughly 14 billion yuan ($2 billion), the rest of the $3.2 billion total is spread across the remaining procurement notices in Reuters’ 150-document audit.
That broader sweep includes live H800 clusters in Wuxi, a 759-million-yuan Fujian computing venture whose contract ended early, and smaller research orders by Shenzhen University and US-blacklisted Northwestern Polytechnical University.
Lutnick says yes, and the projects sit downstream of his department
Senate Banking Committee chair Tim Scott asked Lutnick for a public hearing on reports about Nvidia and Commerce’s role, per NBC, and asked Huang to testify as well.
Lutnick’s spokeswoman Kristen Eichamer said he “proactively agreed to appear voluntarily.” Whether Huang has agreed isn’t confirmed, and no date or format is reported.
NBC says Commerce was tasked with reviewing companies for national security risks before the administration approved Nvidia’s advanced chip sales to China. However, many of China’s AI firms rushed to secure compute before Huang’s exit was made public.
That oversight directly intersects with the Trump administration’s January shift to reviewing H200 export licenses case by case under strict conditions, per Reuters.
While NBC did not detail a formal agenda, lawmakers are pressing to find out what the administration knew and whether those security reviews were properly executed.
Where the money is exposed: loans, delays and a redesign bill
Heavy borrowing makes some of these bets especially fragile. According to an April government prospectus, the Jilin developer plans to fund 80% of its project with bank loans.
This leaves it exposed to delays, supply cutoffs, or expensive redesigns around domestic processors if Washington tightens restrictions further.
That local momentum contrasts sharply with Nvidia’s own outlook.
The company says US curbs have “effectively shut it out” of China’s AI data-centre market, excludes that revenue from its forecasts, and has reportedly instructed cloud partners to sell at least 51% of their services outside China.
Yet IDC estimated Nvidia held 34% of Chinese AI-accelerator shipments in the first half of 2026, a figure Reuters notes tracks a different slice of the market than direct company sales.
While no public finding shows Huang violated export laws, neither Nvidia nor China’s commerce ministry responded to Reuters for comment.
Source: Huang exit and US scrutiny imperil $3 billion in Chinese AI projects reliant on Nvidia
