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Charging companies for evading sanctions and export controls is a pretty regular thing. It’s not about single units crossing the borders but large numbers whic

Charging companies for evading sanctions and export controls is a pretty regular thing. It’s not about single units crossing the borders but large numbers which are much harder to hide and investigation of such things isn’t that hard.

thriftwy 4y ago
What do you do with 100,000 central asian guest workers each carrying one GPU in their cabin baggage when they go to Russia for their construction gig? Smuggling electronics beats smuggling drugs, danger-wise.
- colechristensen 4y ago
  Billion dollar operations like that would be noticed by someone up the chain of suppliers. That just isn’t how these things usually happen. It’s usually a couple of hops of resellers in increasingly distant from American jurisdiction areas.
  - thriftwy 4y ago
    They are going to buy those GPUs in retail and offload for a 20% markup on Russian market. One or two GPUs and they paid for the plane ticket. They can even sell it on Avito on their own. Look, ma, no operation. So you have noticed a lot of retail demand for those consumer goods, what would you do?
nomel 4y ago
Could you describe how this works? What if a company in Kazakhstan buys them and then ships them to Russia? How would the US "charge" a Kazakhstan company? Is it AMD that would be charged? Would AMD be liable for every card they sold? How many levels of misdirection until they're liable? I know nothing about this.
- rvnx 4y ago
  There is a weird extraterritoriality concept that essentially says that if you use USD to commit a crime (they have the buy cards in USD at the beginning), that you can be prosecuted in the US, even if you are not from the US. "any company or individual can be investigated, charged and sentenced because of a remote link with US jurisdiction, such as a transaction in US dollars, the existence of a subsidiary onto US territory, or an exchange with a US citizen." I may be wrong (I'm just guessing) but I suppose that this may be one of the non-technical and legal reason crypto platforms prefer USDC or USDT rather than pure USD.
  - nomel 4y ago
    People in other countries don't use USD to buy Nvidia GPUs, do they? Does Nvidia only accept USD? I would assume they would have somewhat independent foreign markets set up.
    - ngc248 4y ago
      It would be a company which would be buying in bulk, which would use USD while buying. What you mention is about an individual buying from an e-commerce site or a retail seller. That can happen in the local currency.
      - nomel 4y ago
        Does this mean that A100 and H100 are not sold through retailers?
- colechristensen 4y ago
  It really depends on circumstances which are always complicated. An example: https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/us-judge-rules-favor-chinas-zte-ending-probation-2022-03-23/ https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/us-judge-rule... ZTE, a Chinese company, was blacklisted for years and paid something like a billion dollars for evading US sanctions. It is really quite hard to not have connections to the US economy. If you really don't want to do business with us, you probably want to bank with banks that have connections with us. If you don't play ball with our legal system, we'll go after your assets at your bank, and if your bank doesn't want to play ball we'll sanction them and completely cut them off from any bank connected to us. There is no foreign bank that is "too big to fail" if they don't comply with our courts, and really there aren't any that are going to stand behind somebody else's fraud.

thriftwy 4y ago

What do you do with 100,000 central asian guest workers each carrying one GPU in their cabin baggage when they go to Russia for their construction gig? Smuggling electronics beats smuggling drugs, danger-wise.

colechristensen 4y ago
Billion dollar operations like that would be noticed by someone up the chain of suppliers. That just isn’t how these things usually happen. It’s usually a couple of hops of resellers in increasingly distant from American jurisdiction areas.
- thriftwy 4y ago
  They are going to buy those GPUs in retail and offload for a 20% markup on Russian market. One or two GPUs and they paid for the plane ticket. They can even sell it on Avito on their own. Look, ma, no operation. So you have noticed a lot of retail demand for those consumer goods, what would you do?

nomel 4y ago

Could you describe how this works? What if a company in Kazakhstan buys them and then ships them to Russia? How would the US "charge" a Kazakhstan company? Is it AMD that would be charged? Would AMD be liable for every card they sold? How many levels of misdirection until they're liable? I know nothing about this.

rvnx 4y ago
There is a weird extraterritoriality concept that essentially says that if you use USD to commit a crime (they have the buy cards in USD at the beginning), that you can be prosecuted in the US, even if you are not from the US. "any company or individual can be investigated, charged and sentenced because of a remote link with US jurisdiction, such as a transaction in US dollars, the existence of a subsidiary onto US territory, or an exchange with a US citizen." I may be wrong (I'm just guessing) but I suppose that this may be one of the non-technical and legal reason crypto platforms prefer USDC or USDT rather than pure USD.
- nomel 4y ago
  People in other countries don't use USD to buy Nvidia GPUs, do they? Does Nvidia only accept USD? I would assume they would have somewhat independent foreign markets set up.
  - ngc248 4y ago
    It would be a company which would be buying in bulk, which would use USD while buying. What you mention is about an individual buying from an e-commerce site or a retail seller. That can happen in the local currency.
    - nomel 4y ago
      Does this mean that A100 and H100 are not sold through retailers?
colechristensen 4y ago
It really depends on circumstances which are always complicated. An example: https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/us-judge-rules-favor-chinas-zte-ending-probation-2022-03-23/ https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/us-judge-rule... ZTE, a Chinese company, was blacklisted for years and paid something like a billion dollars for evading US sanctions. It is really quite hard to not have connections to the US economy. If you really don't want to do business with us, you probably want to bank with banks that have connections with us. If you don't play ball with our legal system, we'll go after your assets at your bank, and if your bank doesn't want to play ball we'll sanction them and completely cut them off from any bank connected to us. There is no foreign bank that is "too big to fail" if they don't comply with our courts, and really there aren't any that are going to stand behind somebody else's fraud.