<2 class="wp-block-heading">The old guard still commands a premium
Chinese buyers are paying sharply higher prices for restricted AI hardware, with Nvidia A100 servers reportedly tripling in price as US enforcement and Chinese import barriers squeeze both illicit and authorized supply routes.
Servers built around Nvidia’s five-year-old A100 accelerator have risen from about 200,000 yuan to as much as 600,000 yuan, or roughly $82,000, since late 2025. Demand has also pushed buyers toward repurposed gaming GPUs and older Ampere-generation systems that can still be used for inference workloads.
<3 class="wp-block-heading">When new CHIPS are out of reach, last gen gets a second life
The pricing reflects a constrained market rather than a sudden improvement in the A100 itself. The accelerator was launched in 2020 and has been overtaken by Hopper and Blackwell-class hardware, but it remains useful for AI training, fine-tuning and inference where software compatibility, memory capacity and CUDA support matter more than owning the newest chip.
The squeeze has moved up the product stack. Reuters previously reported that Nvidia B300 servers were trading in China at about 7 million yuan (roughly $1 million) in April as black-market supply tightened. The Financial Times now reports that DGX B300 systems have moved above 8 million yuan.
<3 class="wp-block-heading">A perfect storm of export bans and skyrocketing demand
The shortage has two causes. US authorities have stepped up enforcement against alleged diversion of controlled AI systems, including a March indictment charging three people with conspiring to route advanced AI servers to Chinese customers. At the same time, the legal route for newer H200 GPUs has not become a working supply channel.
That leaves Chinese AI firms facing higher costs for any Nvidia-compatible capacity they can obtain, while domestic alternatives from Huawei continue to scale. The result is a distorted compute market where restricted hardware gets older but not cheaper.
