Chinese engineers have discovered an interesting loophole in US export controls that gives them access to NVIDIA’s cutting-edge AI accelerators.

China continues to find loopholes in US policy; despite sanctions, the country still has access to cutting-edge AI chips

Despite the Biden administration’s restrictions designed to prevent China from accessing high-end AI equipment, the country always seems to find a workaround. And this time, they’ve actually found a surprising method to access the power of Team Green’s chips. Rather than purchasing them, Chinese engineers and firms are leaning more towards “rental services,” which we’ll get into later. There have been reports of NVIDIA’s H100s being sold for outrageous prices on China’s black markets, but Chinese engineers have now found a cost-effective workaround.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Chinese engineers are working with certain global brokers to gain access to high-end computing power and that they are using cryptocurrencies as a means of payment to maintain their anonymity. Although NVIDIA’s high-end AI accelerators are still present in Chinese markets, individuals find the rental option more viable as the cost of acquiring components is significantly higher than the cost of just using them for a short period of time.

According to WSJ, Chinese customers are reportedly more likely to turn to Bitcoin miner Derek Aw when it comes to renting computing power, as Aw managed to convince investors to set up large AI clusters using NVIDIA’s H100 AI chips. The entrepreneur is said to have set up 300 servers in a data center in Brisbane, Australia, and is in the process of further expanding his rental business amid high interest from the markets.

Interestingly, this type of business is being adopted by the big tech giants. We have previously reported that Microsoft, Google and other CSPs are responsible for lending NVIDIA A100 and H100-based servers to Chinese customers. And to be fair, this does not currently violate any US laws. Overall, the “GPU decentralized” business has grown massively in two years as restricted countries access high-end computing power this way.

Apart from that, Aw is also increasing investments to add NVIDIA’s Blackwell AI architecture to its arsenal and give consumers the opportunity to use the industry’s latest products. While we don’t know what the pricing scheme looks like, given the current global conflicts, especially between the US and China, we believe GPU decentralization has a long way to go from here.