In order to understand how the high-end chip of NVIDIA was smuggled,
according to the Wall Street Journal,
a Chinese student in Singapore took a plane back to China last fall for vacation.
He had six high-end artificial intelligence AI chips in his suitcase,
and there was no doubt when he left the airport.
This is what a friend of his in college asked him to burn.
He could get $100 in return for each chip he brought back,
which is insignificant compared to the high price of black market sales.
The Wall Street Journal directly contacted 25 of the more than 70 distributors on the Internet.
Many verified sellers said
they sold dozens of NVIDIA high-end chips every month.
This underground secret network is made up of buyers, sellers, and contractors
that can bypass the U.S. government
in order to prevent China from obtaining advanced AI chips made by NVIDIA.
High-end chips play a key role in China-US technology competition.
The report said these sellers generally accept pre-orders,
and promise to deliver in a few weeks.
Some sellers will also sell entire台服器,
which includes eight NVIDIA high-end chips,
priced at about $300,000.
NVIDIA usually does not provide a single high-performance data center chip
but provides these chips to third-party companies such as Dell and SuperMacro Computer,
so that they can provide customers with a complete AI device or system with chips.
According to the industry personnel, in order to deal with the unexpected situation,
the NVIDIA chips purchased by these third-party companies
are often more than what they need.
If the final buyer chooses to move the AI server
and NVIDIA chips in the server to other places,
the ability of these third parties to track is also very limited.
Dell and SuperMacro Computer have said
that once the company follows U.S. export control regulations,
it will take action once it finds illegal behavior.
According to an international trade lawyer,
according to the law,
many foreign governments and judicial branches
do not need to implement U.S. control measures
and generally do not make it a criminal offense to sell such chips to China.
The situation of Chinese students carrying NVIDIA chips
does not violate Singapore law,
because these technical components are not restricted by any export restrictions in Singapore.
The Wall Street Journal estimates that it is not yet clear
the scale of the underground market of NVIDIA high-end chips,
but believes that it will not be much compared to the overall market.
A mysterious intermediary like Brother Jiang
is part of this secret underground network.
Brother Jiang told the Wall Street Journal
that his clients include AI companies, research institutions, and chip agencies.
Some of the entities used in Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Taiwan
violate U.S. restrictions
and can help Chinese customers get chips and servers.
This intermediary, who has worked in the cloud computing and chip industry for more than ten years,
revealed that we don't make big orders, it's too conspicuous.
The Wall Street Journal found some distributors,
some set up physical stores in Shenzhen, Beijing and other places.
It is a online market.
Buyers can buy NVIDIA high-end AI chips and servers here
These distributors' A100 chips are priced at $2.25 million,
and higher-end H100 chips are priced at $3.24 million,
which is about twice the original price.
Some merchants say that their inventory usually has dozens of chips.
If the order is larger, it may be delivered within one to two weeks.
They say these chips are all original packaging, wholesale packaging.
It's a lot harder, but don't be stupid, there's always a way.
A Beijing distributor said in response to the question of how to get these chips.
He also said that in the past few months,
he has been able to receive a batch of goods every month, dozens of pieces per batch.
At the end of last year, after Washington tightened the export of high-end chips,
China's Tsinghua University, China Academy of Sciences, and other universities and research institutions
continue to buy a limited number of NVIDIA high-end AI chips from Chinese distributors,
including the H100 chip released after the U.S. ban was announced.
According to previous sources,
Huawei and other Chinese tech companies sanctioned by the United States are developing high-end chips,
but are facing technological and production bottlenecks.
The Wall Street Journal saw a report.
A top AI research institution reported to President Li Qiang in March that
training large AI models with domestic chips is easy to crash the system.
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