The United States has been trying for months to prevent Chinese organizations from purchasing the NVIDIA’s most advanced chipsessential pieces for the development of artificial intelligence (AI). However, some reports indicate that the measures promoted by Washington have had little effect.
Some private players have used their foreign subsidiaries to access technological components that are not available at home. Others have also turned to black markets. As if that were not enough, Chinese firms have found a third way to use chips for AI: cloud computing.
If you can’t buy it, rent it
Cloud computing has been a reality for years. It allows companies, governments and educational entities to access different computing resources, for example, computers with high computing capacity for artificial intelligence tasks, without the need to have their own data centers.
Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure are two of the largest cloud computing providers on the planet. But The Information says Chinese organizations are using them to circumvent trade restrictions imposed by the United States. They are simply paying to use the service.
The media points out that, in addition to the two American giants, there is a wide variety of smaller suppliers that offer resources to Chinese customersThe data centers that power these services are equipped with advanced NVIDIA hardware and are located outside the Asian giant.
It should be noted that this is not the first time the issue has been discussed. Earlier this year, Joe Biden’s administration considered asking cloud computing companies to report whether foreign entities were using their data centers to train AI models.
“Those chips are in American cloud data centers, so we also have to think about closing that avenue for potential malicious activities“,” Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said at the time.
At the moment, NVIDIA can not offer its A100 products, A800H100, H800, L40, L40S and RTX 4090 on the Chinese market. The ban also affects its DGX and HGX systems. The United States has also succeeded in getting Dutch company ASML to limit its offering of lithography products in China.
Despite the aforementioned battery of measures, the country led by Xi Jinping is working on technological self-sufficiency. This includes creating its own lithography equipment, which is necessary to manufacture the silicon wafers for AI chips, to creating their own specialized AI components.
Images | NVIDIA | Engin Akyurt
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