China and the United States have been waging a trade war for some time. The latter has prompted the Americans to restrict exports of high-end NVIDIA IA GPUs to the Middle Kingdom in order to limit the latter’s military development using American technologies. This is the official reason. However, contrary to all expectations (we would never have guessed it, at any time), cards continue to arrive in China.
NVIDIA GPU smuggling at Super Micro?
Without saying that the American sanctions have no effect, they are being circumvented, or at least smuggling is being organised around the Chameleon’s products. It has to be said that artificial intelligence represents a strategic challenge and that the Chinese, as we have just seen, are very fond of it.
However, China continues to receive equipment that falls under US sanctions, forcing the Chameleon to question its partners. Dell and Super Micro, two major players in the server sector, are therefore under suspicion.
For its part, Dell says it is strict with its distributors and resellers. In the event of failure to comply with control regulations, the company goes so far as to terminate contracts with its partners.
As far as Super Micro is concerned, we have a similar message and say that we are taking all measures to comply with the various regulations. However, there has been a leak at Super Micro, where five smugglers found a way to export servers to China internally. To do this, they resorted to duplicating or swapping serial numbers to slip through the net. Sometimes, the serial numbers were even changed in the servers’ OS.
If it’s come to this, we imagine that these people have been unmasked and punished. However, we wouldn’t be surprised if there were other sources of supply. In any case, via Reuters, VIDIA indicated on the subject :
“We insist that our customers and partners strictly adhere to export controls and regulations. Any unauthorised diversion of used hardware, including any kind of grey market resale, would be a burden, not a benefit”
