China gets the chips it needs at will

• Reuters analyzed hundreds of documents showing how banned NVIDIA chips end up in China.

• These advanced integrated circuits are used by major research centers in China.

The latest semiconductors continue to flow into China, which the United States and its allies under no circumstances want to fall into the hands of the government led by Xi Jinping. Reuters analyzed several hundred tender documents which reflect with absolute clarity how Chinese universities and research centers are obtaining cutting-edge integrated circuits that are expressly prohibited by US sanctions.

Until now, we knew that China gets some of the advanced chips it needs through parallel markets based mainly in Singapore and India, but now, thanks to Reuters research, we know something more. We know that Chinese research institutions that have the ability to work directly with the military to develop new weapons have found a way to circumvent US restrictions.

China gets NVIDIA chips in Super Micro, Dell and Gigabyte products

We didn’t expect this. Tender documents reviewed by Reuters show that ten Chinese research organizations have received cutting-edge chips developed by NVIDIA for artificial intelligence (AI) applications. through resellers who participated in tenders. The curious thing is that they did not buy these integrated circuits for free; They purchased them from servers assembled by manufacturers Super Micro, Dell and Gigabyte.

The servers purchased by universities and research centers in China contain some of NVIDIA’s most advanced GPUs. The sale of these chips in the Asian country is expressly prohibited by sanctions that the US imposed on November 16 and which it extended at the beginning of April this month, regardless of the channel through which they reach the market. However, it is likely that resellers took over these servers before the tightening of US sanctions on November 16th.

NVIDIA got wet. The company, led by Jensen Huang, claims that GPUs integrated into these servers were widespread before the latest round of sanctions took effect, so still available

. And the server manufacturers, which, as we see, are two American companies and a Taiwanese company, claim that they fully comply with current legislation and promise that they will investigate what happened.

To make matters worse, the Chinese institutions that purchased these servers are very important in the field of research. And these are the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Shandong Institute of Artificial Intelligence, the Hubei Earthquake Bureau, Shandong and Southwest Universities, a research center specializing in aeronautics, and a center specializing in space science, among other organizations.

It will not be easy for the US government to put an end to this practice, but it is likely that it will try to block this route of banned chips into China by subjecting them to strict controls. global distribution network of computer equipment. It probably won’t take long to hear from the US Commerce Department, which, among other things, issues export licenses and subsidies to companies that design and manufacture semiconductors.

Image | NVIDIA

Additional information | Reuters

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