“China’s Military and Government Acquire Nvidia Chips despite US Ban”, 2024-01-15 ():
Chinese military bodies, state-run artificial intelligence research institutes and universities have over the past year purchased small batches of Nvidia semiconductors banned by the US from export to China, a Reuters review of tender documents show.
…Buying or selling high-end US chips is not illegal in China and the publicly available tender documents show dozens of Chinese entities have bought and taken receipt of Nvidia semiconductors since restrictions were imposed.
…The former purchased 6 Nvidia A100 chips in May to train a deep-learning model. The latter purchased one A100 in December 2022…The review includes more than 100 tenders where state entities have procured A100 chips and dozens of tenders since the October ban show purchases of the A800. Tenders published last month also show Tsinghua University procured 2 H100 chips while a laboratory run by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology procured one. The buyers include one unnamed People’s Liberation Army entity based in the city of Wuxi, Jiangsu province, according to tenders from a military database. It sought 3 A100 chips in October and one H100 chip this month…In one example, the Shandong Artificial Intelligence Institute awarded a 290,000 yuan ($40,500) contract for 5 A100 chips to Shandong Chengxiang Electronic Technology last month…Tsinghua University, dubbed China’s Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is a prolific issuer of tenders and has purchased some 80 A100 chips since the 2022 ban. In December, Chongqing University published a tender for one A100 chip that explicitly stated it could not be second-hand or disassembled but had to be “brand new”. The delivery was completed this month, a notice showed.
…A model similar to OpenAI’s GPT-4 would require more than 30,000 Nvidia A100 cards [to commercialize], according to research firm TrendForce.