From Robinhood's Sherwood News, July 18:
Chinese firms can access Nvidia chips by renting servers in other countries
One of the defining geopolitical struggles of the last few years has been America’s attempts to limit Chinese access to advanced artificial intelligence chips through export bans. China is America’s biggest rival, the world is in an AI arms race, and America doesn’t want China to take the lead.
For private companies that produce AI chips, however, China doesn’t represent a geopolitical enemy. It represents a customer base. Despite current export bans on chip sales to China, American companies have still found ways to sell “access” to Nvidia’s AI chips to Chinese companies. From The Information:
Both Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure are offering to rent Nvidia’s AI chips to Chinese companies, including AI startups, for use in data centers outside China. But apart from the biggest U.S. tech giants, there is a whole sector of smaller cloud providers specializing in offering access to Nvidia-powered servers around the world, and their services are available to Chinese customers. Some of these cloud providers are based in the U.S., but numerous others are based in Europe and Asia.
Last summer, for example, Google Cloud’s Asia Pacific team contacted a prominent Chinese startup that develops large-language models and offered to rent servers in Europe with Nvidia’s A100 and H100 chips, according to a person with direct knowledge of the talks. U.S. rules block the export of both kinds of chips to China. The approach didn’t lead to a deal....
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