The race to develop and deploy the most powerful artificial intelligence (AI) models has rapidly heated up over the past few years, and the United States is making sure that China cannot catch up with US-made technology.

However, a new report reveals that state-linked Chinese entities have been using cloud services from Amazon or Amazon competitors to gain access to these advanced semiconductor chips and banned AI capabilities.

Breaking the Limits

A review of more than 50 public tender documents found that at least 11 Chinese entities sought access to restricted US technology or cloud services.

Of the entities analyzed, four explicitly cited Amazon Web Services (AWS) as their cloud service provider. However, the entities accessed the service through a Chinese intermediary company rather than directly from AWS.

The investigation found in a tender document from April 2024 that Zhejiang Lab, a Chinese research institute working on its own LLM, GeoGPT, said it planned to spend 184,000 yuan ($25,783) to buy cloud computing services from AWS. The company revealed that its AI model currently cannot get enough computing power using China's Alibaba alone.

Another document shows Shenzhen University spent 200,000 yuan ($27,996) on an AWS account, accessing cloud servers using Nvidia A100 and H100 chips for an unspecified project.

Over the past year, despite the US embargo, China’s chip market has been actively looking for ways to circumvent the restrictions, such as turning to local chipmakers and relying on new products from the world’s top chipmaker Nvidia that can be shipped to China.

Nvidia chips are at the heart of the US's restricted AI products, particularly the A100 chip and the more powerful H100 chip, which are banned in September 2022.

The company's slower A800 and H800 chips were originally developed for sale in China, although they have also been banned since October 2023. The US has cited the need to limit the Chinese military's AI capabilities.

However, in April 2024, Reuters found bidding documents revealing that China had access to the chip through Supermicro's Dell servers.

Tighten restrictions

However, recent revelations about China’s access to advanced U.S. chips and AI models are not a violation of U.S. regulations that specifically target the export or transfer of goods, software, or the technology itself.

An AWS spokesperson said:

“AWS complies with all applicable U.S. laws, including trade laws, in connection with the provision of AWS services in and outside of China.”

The US government is responding to efforts to circumvent Chinese restrictions by trying to tighten restrictions further to include access through the cloud.

Michael McCaul, chairman of the US House Foreign Affairs Committee, said he had been concerned about the loophole for years and “it was time to address it.”

Microsoft's cloud servers are also being targeted by several Chinese organizations, including Sichuan University, which said in another tender document that it was developing a generative AI platform and purchasing 40 million Microsoft Azure OpenAI tokens.

China has previously responded to US restrictions by tightening controls, including export controls on metals primarily used to make semiconductors.

https://tapchibitcoin.io/trung-quoc-tiep-can-chip-ai-cao-cap-bi-hoa-ky-cam.html