Israeli security company Lava has detected 32 NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra B300 GPUs associated with IP addresses linked to China Telecom, the Chinese state-owned carrier, even though US export controls ban selling those chips to China. The finding, first reported by The Information on October 22, 2026, doesn’t come from a seizure or a customs inspection, but from something more mundane: GPU monitoring tools exposed to the internet without protection.
The key facts about the China Telecom-linked B300s in 30 seconds
- Lava located 32 B300 GPUs on servers with IP addresses associated with China Telecom, the Chinese state-owned carrier.
- It found them through instances of NVIDIA DCGM Exporter exposed to the internet without authentication.
- An IP association doesn’t prove who owns the hardware or where it’s physically located.
- Nothing in the finding indicates that NVIDIA sold those chips in China, where their sale is banned.
- The same Lava study found roughly 2,100 servers with more than 12,000 exposed GPUs.
The case illustrates a two-sided problem. On one hand, the difficulty of controlling where the most advanced AI accelerators end up once they leave the factory. On the other, how much information operators unintentionally reveal when they leave their telemetry tools open.
How the B300s were found
DCGM Exporter is NVIDIA’s tool that publishes a server’s GPU metrics over HTTP — things like temperature, utilization, memory, power draw, and errors — typically so Prometheus can scrape them. That data includes the exact model of each card and its unique identifier. If the service is left accessible from the internet without restrictions, anyone can check what hardware sits behind an IP address.
That’s how Lava arrived at the 32 B300s. According to the summary published by Crypto Briefing based on The Information’s report, the company’s research values the B300s and other similar GPUs it located at more than $100 million. The report itself stresses that the link to China Telecom is a network association, distinct from confirming the hardware’s physical ownership or exact location. An IP address belonging to the carrier can correspond to transit, hosting, or customer services, and isn’t enough to claim the state-owned company operates those machines.
There’s also no public reaction yet from the parties involved. The available reports don’t include statements from NVIDIA, China Telecom, or the US Department of Commerce, and they explicitly note that nothing in Lava’s data indicates NVIDIA sold the chips in China.
Export controls and the gray market
The B300s, part of the Blackwell Ultra family, are NVIDIA’s high end for data center training and inference — the same lineup being deployed by providers like Together AI, which announced a $240 million investment with IBM in NVIDIA B300 inference. The US bans their sale to China on national security grounds, under export controls that have been tightening since 2022.
The appearance of restricted hardware on Chinese networks isn’t new, and the reports on this case point to rising prices for advanced AI chips in China’s gray and black markets. What’s different here is the method: instead of tracing shipments or intermediaries, the lead comes from the telemetry that the servers themselves publish. That opens a verification path for regulators and researchers, but it also shows its limits, because an exposed metric says what GPU is there, not who bought it or how it got there.
Thousands of exposed GPUs and a security flaw
The B300 finding is part of a broader investigation Lava published in early October. Across four scans conducted between March and May 2026, the company found roughly 2,100 servers with DCGM Exporter accessible from the internet, together exposing more than 12,000 GPUs across some 300 organizations. According to The Register, 44% of those GPUs (5,274) were in the United States, and those affected included customers of GPU cloud providers such as Nebius, Voltage Park, Lambda, Northern Data, and DigitalOcean, which Lava says worked with their customers to fix the exposure.
The investigation also uncovered CVE-2026-47483, which NVIDIA rated with a CVSS score of 8.2. It lets an unauthenticated attacker crash the monitoring service, which can affect AI workloads on the same server. NVIDIA recommends updating DCGM Exporter to version 4.8.2 or later and keeping the --enable-pprof profiling option disabled if it isn’t needed. Lava advises against exposing DCGM Exporter, Node Exporter, or Prometheus to the internet, binding them to private interfaces, and restricting access with firewalls or security groups.
Frequently Asked Questions
What did Lava find?
32 NVIDIA B300 GPUs on servers with IP addresses associated with China Telecom, detected through instances of DCGM Exporter exposed to the internet.
Does the finding prove China Telecom is using those GPUs?
No. The IP association doesn’t confirm who owns the hardware or where it’s physically located, as the reports themselves stress.
Can China legally buy NVIDIA B300 GPUs?
No. US export controls ban their sale to China on national security grounds.
How is DCGM Exporter secured?
By updating to version 4.8.2 or later, disabling profiling if it’s not in use, and avoiding exposure to the internet, with access limited to the monitoring infrastructure.
Sources:
- Gate: Lava finds 32 Nvidia B300 chips linked to China Telecom IPs
- Crypto Briefing: Lava, Nvidia B300 chips and China Telecom
- The Register: exposed Nvidia GPU monitoring and CVE-2026-47483
- Help Net Security: NVIDIA DCGM Exporter vulnerability CVE-2026-47483
- The Information (October 22, 2026), cited by Crypto Briefing
