The economic and trade sanctions imposed on Chinese technology companies have forced the country to think outside the box on how to accelerate their technology development.
From smuggling components through Singapore and Malaysia to stealing employees from other chip developers and manufacturers, the country’s companies have done everything possible to not only evade the restrictions, but also to advance technology, especially in the AI segment.
Recently, it was reported that four employees of a Chinese AI technology developer “smuggled” 15 hard drives, each containing 80TB of data, intended to train AI systems from the country using server machines rented in Kuala Lumpur.
A report from the Wall Street Journal also said that this had been planned for several months, and for the company, it was faster to just fly these hard drives to Malaysia than to send the data to the server machines here via an internet connection.
Four workers were flown to Malaysia to facilitate their import of the hard drives and not raise suspicions from Malaysian Immigration as to why so many computer components were being brought into the country.
These individuals then went to a local data center company, where the Chinese AI company had already rented 300 AI server machines powered by NVIDIA AI processing chips for the purpose of training machine learning and AI systems.
The rental of server machines and data center capacity by Chinese companies does not appear to be prohibited. The issue here is that due to China’s trade and import/export restrictions, this could be seen as a way for the company to circumvent the restrictions and use AI components that they are not allowed to use.