The latest report from the US "Wall Street Journal" on Monday (August 26) stated that Chinese artificial intelligence developers have found a way to use the most advanced American chips without bringing them to China.
The report pointed out that Chinese artificial intelligence developers work with middlemen to obtain overseas computing power and sometimes use technology from the cryptocurrency world to hide their identities.
This strategy is a response to U.S. export controls. U.S. export controls prevent Chinese companies from directly importing artificial intelligence chips developed by U.S. company Nvidia.
Although it is still possible for Chinese users to bring Nvidia chips to China through a network of gray market sellers, the process is cumbersome and cannot meet all the needs of large users.
According to the Wall Street Journal, former Bitcoin miner Derek Aw is an entrepreneur helping Chinese companies overcome obstacles. He persuaded investors in Dubai and the United States to fund AI servers powered by Nvidia's powerful H100 chip.
In June, Aw's company installed more than 300 servers equipped with the chip in a data center in Brisbane, Australia. Three weeks later, the servers began processing artificial intelligence algorithms for a company in Beijing.
"There's a demand. There's a profit. Someone will supply it," Aw said.
Renting remote computing power is nothing new, with many multinational companies using services from US companies such as Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS to move data around the world. However, like banks, these companies have "know your customer" policies that may make it difficult for some Chinese customers to access state-of-the-art computing power.
The Wall Street Journal said that lawyers familiar with U.S. sanctions said that buyers and sellers of computing power and the middlemen who match them did not violate any laws.
Washington has targeted the export of advanced chips, equipment and technology, but cloud companies say the export rules do not restrict Chinese companies or their foreign subsidiaries from obtaining U.S. cloud services that use Nvidia chips.
The U.S. Commerce Department proposed a rule in January aimed at preventing malicious foreign entities from using U.S. cloud computing services for activities including training large artificial intelligence models. U.S. cloud computing companies believe that the regulation will not prevent abuse, but will undermine customer trust and weaken their competitiveness.
The above-mentioned platforms use blockchain technology to handle contract signing and billing, allowing users to represent their identity only by a series of letters and numbers, and then pay in cryptocurrency.
Aw said he also may not know the true identity of the buyer. Chinese AI companies often trade through subsidiaries in Singapore or elsewhere.
In the past two years, similar platforms have become more and more popular. As activity in the cryptocurrency field slowed down, they freed up some computers previously used to mine digital currencies to collect computing power scattered around the world and then rented it out to AI developers. .
