Lava uncovers banned Nvidia chips linked to China Telecom addresses

What happened

22, 2026 Israeli security firm Lava has identified 32 Nvidia Blackwell Ultra B300 chips linked to IP addresses connected to China Telecom, the state-owned carrier. NVIDIA is a semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, and its products and services include graphics processing units.

The chips weren’t found through a raid or a customs seizure. The findings were first reported by The Information on October 22, 2026.

Those exposed endpoints reveal what hardware is running behind them. The exposure of Nvidia chips highlights vulnerabilities in global tech supply chains and underscores the challenges of enforcing export controls.

US export controls bar the sale of these chips to China on national security grounds. Lava spotted them because someone left a monitoring dashboard open to the internet.

How a monitoring tool gave the game away Lava traced the chips through publicly exposed instances of Nvidia’s DCGM Exporter. This is a monitoring tool that operators use to keep tabs on their GPUs (a chip built for many calculations at once, used for graphics and AI).

In this case, the hardware included 32 B300 chips, and the associated IP addresses pointed back to China Telecom.