Despite a US export ban, China has bought special chips for artificial intelligence (AI) from US manufacturer Nvidia. Military institutions, state AI research institutes and universities purchased small batches of the semiconductors last year, according to an analysis of tender documents by the Reuters news agency. However, the documents did not reveal how the providers procured their Nvidia chips.
The company stated that it adheres to all applicable export regulations and demands the same from its customers. “If we learn that a customer has made an illegal resale to a third party, we will take immediate and appropriate action,” a spokesman said. The US Department of Commerce has so far declined to comment. None of the buyers named in the documents also responded to Reuters requests for comment.
The chips sold to China are the A100 and the more powerful H100, whose export to China and Hong Kong was banned in September 2022, as well as the slower A800 and H800, which Nvidia developed explicitly for the Chinese market due to export restrictions. which were also banned last October.
It’s unrealistic to believe that U.S. export restrictions are “watertight” because the chips are small and can be easily smuggled, said Chris Miller, a professor at Tufts University and author of “Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology”. The main goal is to “throw sand in the gears of China’s AI development” by making it more difficult to build large units of advanced chips that can be used to train AI systems.