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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 i

by 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.
- nomel 4y ago
  > It is really quite hard to not have connections to the US economy. I'm not sure I understand. AI startups are everywhere. It seems it would be trivial to set up a Kazakhstan AI "startup", buy a bunch, then ship them to Russia/China. Or are you saying that any non-governmental entity that would be interested in these would also be interested in the US market? And, someone friendly to the US would eventually peek in their server room and rat them out?
  - colechristensen 4y ago
    You would need a lot of capital to do that, where's it coming from and do the people who have it really want to be sanctioned, lose privileges to fly basically anywhere, have bank accounts, or travel anywhere at all? Like everybody involved has to be fine with being airgapped entirely from the western banking system and any allied country or risk quite a long time in prison. Who's got tens or hundreds of million dollars and wants to risk it evading export controls for a percentage profit? Perhaps you don't understand, your Kazakstan bank would freeze your funds for the Americans because they didn't want to lose the ability to transact with any bank attached to the US or any bank attached to any bank attached to the US. The financial reach of US courts is long and not many people with lots of resources want to be blacklisted from ever traveling, spending money, or doing any transactions with the west. And do you think the CIA isn't watching some random ex-soviet satellite state startup with sketchy funding sources buying enough A100s to build a supercomputer and then producing nothing with them? It's their whole job to look for interesting things, and they find them more than is imagined. If you hear about it, they're doing a bad job. Everybody's entire phone records and so much more are part of an NSA dragnet. Do you really think large transactions for high potency computer equipment is being ignored?

by nomel 4y ago

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.

nomel 4y ago
> It is really quite hard to not have connections to the US economy. I'm not sure I understand. AI startups are everywhere. It seems it would be trivial to set up a Kazakhstan AI "startup", buy a bunch, then ship them to Russia/China. Or are you saying that any non-governmental entity that would be interested in these would also be interested in the US market? And, someone friendly to the US would eventually peek in their server room and rat them out?
- colechristensen 4y ago
  You would need a lot of capital to do that, where's it coming from and do the people who have it really want to be sanctioned, lose privileges to fly basically anywhere, have bank accounts, or travel anywhere at all? Like everybody involved has to be fine with being airgapped entirely from the western banking system and any allied country or risk quite a long time in prison. Who's got tens or hundreds of million dollars and wants to risk it evading export controls for a percentage profit? Perhaps you don't understand, your Kazakstan bank would freeze your funds for the Americans because they didn't want to lose the ability to transact with any bank attached to the US or any bank attached to any bank attached to the US. The financial reach of US courts is long and not many people with lots of resources want to be blacklisted from ever traveling, spending money, or doing any transactions with the west. And do you think the CIA isn't watching some random ex-soviet satellite state startup with sketchy funding sources buying enough A100s to build a supercomputer and then producing nothing with them? It's their whole job to look for interesting things, and they find them more than is imagined. If you hear about it, they're doing a bad job. Everybody's entire phone records and so much more are part of an NSA dragnet. Do you really think large transactions for high potency computer equipment is being ignored?