For years, a sign outside one of Silicon Valley’s many nondescript offices said Inspur, the name of one of China’s most important technology companies.

But in March 2023, the United States added Inspur Group to the so-called entity list, a blacklist with more than 3,000 companies that have been restricted from doing business with the United States because they are considered a security risk.

Not long after, the Inspur sign was changed to Aivres, the name of Inspur’s new U.S. subsidiary. The subsidiary continued with its Chinese parent company’s work, helping it build a thriving global network to provide the computing power that supplies China’s growing artificial intelligence industry.

The Silicon Valley subsidiary, which appears to be taking advantage of several loopholes in U.S. export law, has played a key role in Inspur’s sidestepping of American restrictions. Federal officials have begun looking into the subsidiary’s business, but it is not clear where that inquiry stands, said four officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not allowed to discuss it.

The New York Times examined thousands of shipment records, corporate documents and supply contracts to piece together how Inspur’s network works. Reporters also visited sites in China, Southeast Asia and California, and spoke with more than a dozen current and former officials, tech executives and industry analysts.

The U.S. government prohibits the most advanced chips, like the Blackwell chip from the Silicon Valley giant Nvidia, from being sent to any company in China. And U.S. law bars any company anywhere in the world from buying restricted products made with American technology on behalf of a blacklisted company. But there are few restrictions on companies in China that bar them from remotely gaining access to A.I. data centers in Southeast Asia.

Whether Chinese firms are getting access to cutting-edge technology, particularly high-end computer chips made by Nvidia, has become a hot question in Silicon Valley and Washington, where executives and officials worry that China could use A.I. for hacking, surveillance and military operations.

Chinese A.I. companies are also closing the performance gap on systems made by their American competitors, raising concerns that the Chinese companies are using American technology.

From April 2024 through February 2026, Aivres exported at least $5.6 billion of advanced technology from the United States to Southeast Asia, including more than $3 billion of computers containing cutting-edge Blackwell chips and equipment from Nvidia, according to trade records analyzed by ImportGenius, a data firm, and The Times.

That technology went to data centers and technology firms in Southeast Asia that serve China’s biggest tech firms, including Alibaba and ByteDance, trade records show. Megaspeed, a China-linked company that U.S. officials have been investigating over whether it smuggled restricted chips into China, was among that group of recipients. (One of Megaspeed’s subsidiaries has financial ties with Alibaba, according to Malaysian business documents.)

Other technology went from Inspur’s network of global subsidiaries to an electronics manufacturer in Malaysia, which has been shipping unlabeled but high-priced servers to China, according to trade records drawn mostly from Malaysia and Indonesia. The servers are sent to a new firm, Maginfra, which has supplied high-performance computers to Chinese universities and state-owned firms, according to Chinese contracts and procurement records.

Inspur, Aivres, Maginfra, Alibaba and ByteDance did not respond to requests for comment. Megaspeed did not provide a comment. John Rizzo, a spokesman for Nvidia, said the company did not support “diverted products,” and sold to well-known partners “who work with us to ensure that all sales comply with U.S. export control rules.”

The Trump administration rolled back Biden-era restrictions on remote access by Chinese companies to data centers in other countries, and both the administration and Congress have been weighing new rules to replace them. Nvidia’s Mr. Rizzo said the business brought “tens of billions of dollars and high-paying jobs home.”

The administration has also taken a more cautious approach to placing sanctions on Chinese firms, after attempts last year to expand the entity list drew blowback from China. Inside the Commerce Department, which enforces the list, six current and former officials described an agency that had lost its appetite for cases involving China or Nvidia. Ten months have passed without a firm’s being added to the entity list, the longest stretch in 18 years.

A White House official said the Trump administration had enacted the most rigorous export control regime in modern history and was committed to safeguarding America’s national security.

But Jordan Nanos, an analyst at SemiAnalysis, a tech research firm, who has studied Aivres’s business, said that the firm operated in the United States with the same servers, employees and offices as its parent company, Inspur, and that federal officials seemed to have done little about it.

“Are they trying to ban them, or are they not?” he said.