There is a brutal trade war between the United States and China, started by the former, and it is only getting worse. The most recent restrictions aim to limit Chinese capabilities in the use of artificial intelligence, thus limiting the power of the hardware they can acquire. But, the Chinese engineers They found a curious flaw: Rent computing power from data centers.
A few months ago, the United States imposed a law limiting the power of graphics cards that could be shipped to China. The worst hit by this sanction was NVIDIA, which developed specific solutions for the Chinese market.
According to the US, China intends to use these graphs to power military-grade artificial intelligence systems. The idea would be to create new, more accurate weapons systems or improve their weapons, among other things. Come on, this seems like more of an excuse to limit China’s technological development capacity than anything else.
China finds loophole to bypass US sanctions
Given the Chinese inability to purchase high-end AI hardware, they have been looking for alternatives. It seems that they have found a way around the restrictions, which is quite ingenious. This solution allows them to access the latest GPU by NVIDIAthe most powerful in the world for AI.
Chinese companies and engineers have chosen to “rental services“. At the same time, various rumors speak of a Chinese market where NVIDIA H100 is sold at ridiculously high prices. To avoid this, they came up with a very bold method.
The Wall Street Journal has revealed that Chinese engineers are working with global middlemen to gain access to high-end computer systems. Moreover, they indicate that the payment method would be via cryptocurrencies, which allows them to guarantee privacy.
Although in China there are accelerators with high-end NVIDIA solutions and there is a black market, they see more interest there. rent electricity to data centers other countries. This, although it may seem incredible, allows them to save a lot of money and significantly reduce time. Set up a system of computing for AI This can take months, so you save yourself the wait.
The WSJ reveals that Chinese customers are reportedly using Bitcoin miner Derek Aw for electricity rental services. It appears that Aw has convinced investors to build large-scale AI clusters based on NVIDIA H100 chips.
They report that Aw created 300 servers in a data center Brisbane, Australia. In addition, they emphasize that they would be expanding their business due to the interest shown.
Companies like Microsoft or Google are also adopting this business of setting up NVIDIA H100 and A100-based servers to rent them to Chinese customers. Since this does not violate any type of law, it allows them to open new business avenues. Developing a “decentralized GPU” system for AI seems to be a very profitable business.
At least the mechanism that the Chinese have found to access great computing power for AI is interesting. The truth is that the United States, as always, is opening doors in the field.
