The United States is doing everything possible to prevent China from advancing at the same pace in the field of artificial intelligence by limiting NVIDIA’s options. The same thing is happening with Russia, but according to Bloomberg, the country led by Putin has access to NVIDIA’s AI H100 chips.
This is a violation of the export laws of the European Union and the United States. Clearly, NVIDIA isn’t stupid enough to break these laws. Russia, as China probably also does, has access to H100 chips of NVIDIA through third countries, demonstrating, once again, that this type of sanctions amounts to wanting to open the doors to the countryside.
This is how Russia gets access to the latest generation NVIDIA GPUs
Both countries can directly access these graphics by going to the black market or even renting GPU servers. The method used by Russia is through a network of companies that starts in Malaysia and ends in India, from where they are sent directly to Russian territory. Through this method, Russia gained access to AI Teams with NVIDIA graphics valued at $300 million.
The equipment arriving in Russia is Dell PowerEdge servers, equipment which is sent directly to Malaysia, everything is normal. From there they are sent again to India, specifically to the pharmaceutical company Shreya Life Sciences, which is also common since these types of companies have been adopting AI for some time now to research new products.
Bloomberg says this pharmaceutical company has shipped 1,111 units of the server model PowerEdge XE9860 from Dell, with next-generation AI accelerators from NVIDIA. These servers are available with 8 NVIDIA H100 GPUs, with 8 H-200 GPUs from the same manufacturer and also with 8 AMD Instinct MI300X GPUs and have processors Intel Xeon 5th generation.
Russia is rumored to be using the computing power of Dell servers with NVIDIA and AMD graphics to improve military applications which are used in the war with Ukraine in addition to being used in other areas, which has caused enormous concern among American authorities.
There is nothing the United States can do to prevent it.
This is exactly the same thing that the current Joe Bien government has demonstrated with China over the last two years, forcing that country to give a blank check to Huawei develop yours AI Accelerator which we have talked about in other articles and which, according to the last news, was manufactured by TSMC without knowing that they were intended for China.
Unlike the European Union and the United States, Russia continues to maintain trade relations with China and India, so no national laws are violated for these countries. If we talk about India, we are talking about an emerging country in which many American companies are betting very big and have shifted some of the manufacturing of their products from China, so if the United States tries to cut the supply of this country, they would go against the interests of their companies.