Several organizations in China have tried to rent high-end graphics cards from U.S. cloud providers, Reuters reported late Thursday.

The news agency learned of the procurement efforts by reviewing publicly available tender documents, which are invitations asking companies to submit bids for a contract, in this case for the purchase of artificial intelligence infrastructure.

Due to U.S. export controls imposed two years ago, Nvidia Corp. is prohibited from selling its high-end H100 and A100 graphics processors to companies in China. The rules also apply to certain other data center chips optimized for AI workloads. While such chips cannot be sold or transferred to companies based in China, leasing them through the cloud is not prohibited.

Documents seen by Reuters show that at least 11 Chinese organizations attempted to access “restricted U.S. technologies or cloud services,” with many of these organizations planning to conduct the transactions through intermediaries.

According to Reuters, a university spent the equivalent of $28,000 to access Amazon Web Services Inc. instances equipped with A100 and H100 chips. In April, a research institute developing a custom large-scale language model announced it would spend a similar amount on AWS infrastructure, intending to use the hardware to run an AI model.

Microsoft Corp.’s rival Azure cloud was also mentioned in the tender documents. In one of the documents, a university said it had acquired access to OpenAI models hosted on Azure. The deal included 40 billion tokens worth of AI processing capacity.

Like Microsoft, AWS offers access to third-party AI models in its cloud. According to Reuters, the Amazon.com Inc. subsidiary has released a series of Chinese-language marketing documents highlighting the ability to try out “best-in-class AI models” on its platform. The news agency reported that some of the marketing materials, including blog posts, referenced Anthropic PBC’s Claude series of LLMs.

Following the report, AWS updated dozens of blog posts to note that not all of its services are available through its cloud regions in China. A spokesperson told Reuters: “Amazon Bedrock customers are subject to Anthropic’s end user license agreement, which prohibits access to Claude in China through both Amazon’s Bedrock API (application programming interface) and Anthropic’s own API.”

The report comes as U.S. policymakers take steps to more tightly regulate cloud-hosted AI models and chips.

In January, the Ministry of Commerce suggested a rule that would require cloud providers to be more transparent about how customers use their platforms to train AI models. The rule would place a particular focus on AI models capable of “malicious cyber activity.” Recently, lawmakers have submitted a bill that would allow regulators to more closely scrutinize how technologies such as AI chips are accessed through the cloud.

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