Chinese tech firms are paying roughly $1 million apiece for Nvidia's (NASDAQ: NVDA) B300 servers - almost twice what U.S. buyers pay - as Washington's export curbs and a fresh crackdown on chip smuggling choke off black-market supply, Reuters reported, citing four industry sources.
Double The U.S. Price Tag
The B300 is fetching about 7 million yuan (roughly $1 million) per server in China, the report said, versus around $550,000 in the U.S., where prices have crept up from about $500,000 late last year.
In China, prices were closer to 4 million yuan late last year before the squeeze took hold.
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Buyers priced out of an outright purchase are turning to rentals, which Reuters said are running as high as 190,000 yuan a month on one-year contracts.
Each B300 server houses eight GPUs and carries 288 GB of high-bandwidth memory, with Reuters describing it as one of the most powerful options on the market for AI inference workloads.
Nvidia and partners including Super Micro Computer Inc. (NASDAQ: SMCI) began shipments last September.
Smuggling Crackdown Tightens The Screws
The B300 is not officially sold in China. Nvidia told Reuters its partners are required to follow strict compliance rules and warned that diverted hardware will not get company support.
"As systems become increasingly large and complex, unlawful diversion is a recipe for failure," Nvidia said in a statement to Reuters.
The gray market has thinned since U.S. prosecutors in March charged Yih-Shyan "Wally" Liaw, a co-founder of Nvidia partner Supermicro, the report said.
Adding to the supply tension: Nvidia's H200 chips, cleared for export by both Washington and Beijing, still haven't made it into Chinese data centers as the two sides spar over the terms of the deal.
China's AI Demand Is Exploding
The price spike is colliding with a sharp jump in Chinese AI usage. Reuters cited a Morgan Stanley note showing Chinese AI models accounted for 32% of global token usage in March 2026, up from 5% a year earlier - a shift the bank attributed to gains in coding and agentic capabilities.
MiniMax, Zhipu and Alibaba Group Holding's (NYSE: BABA) Qwen each saw token usage climb as much as sixfold or sevenfold in February and March compared with December, according to the same note.
Nvidia's China Market Share
Even with the export wall, Nvidia still holds about 55% of China's AI chip market, per the Reuters report - a notable share given its top products technically aren't supposed to be sold there.
Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ: AMD) sits at just 4%, while Huawei Technologies and other domestic chipmakers are angling to use the disruption to chip away at Nvidia's lead.