Report: Chinese companies can rent Nvidia chips from Google and Microsoft
A US embargo prohibits the export of Nvidia's powerful AI accelerators to China. However, Chinese companies can apparently book these chips in US clouds.
(Image: Dario Lo Presti/Shutterstock.com)
China has to stop importing Nvidia's most powerful chips for artificial intelligence training due to US trade restrictions. But why buy when you can rent? Apparently, Google, Microsoft and other cloud providers are offering Chinese companies computing time on Nvidia's AI accelerators if these companies book cloud services in data centers outside of China, particularly in the USA.
Microsoft, for example, offers Chinese companies rental servers with Nvidia's A100 and H100 AI accelerators, reports The Information magazine, citing Microsoft employees familiar with these services. Google allows Chinese customers to use services on servers located in data centers outside of China, but is confident that it will comply with US export controls, according to an informant. Neither Microsoft, Google's parent company Alphabet, Nvidia nor the US Department of Commerce have yet responded to corresponding inquiries.
Nvidia vs. regulators
In October 2022, the US government ordered Nvidia to stop exporting its top chips A100 and H100 to China, whereupon Nvidia introduced the A800 and H800 models. In principle, these were the regular A/H100 chips with unthrottled computing power, but their Nvlink interface was simply slowed down by a third (from 600 to 400 GByte/s) in order to just about meet the export requirements.
In October 2023, the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) reacted to this trick and massively restricted the computing power, leaving only Nvidia's first Tensor GPU V100 from the existing product range for export to China. This is why Chinese companies are spurning Nvidia's export chips.
US government wants to close the gap
The Biden administration is well aware of China's cloud way out and has already introduced a defense law with new far-reaching requirements for AI companies at the beginning of this year. This includes cloud providers such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google having to notify the US government if a foreign company uses their resources to train a large language model.
This regulation was published in advance at the end of January 2024 and put up for public discussion. Interested parties were able to submit comments on the proposed decree until the end of April. However, it seems to have remained that way, as the US Department of Commerce has apparently not yet finalized the regulation. At the very least, it is not currently listed in the US Federal Register.
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