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Nvidia's fear of getting slapped with a fine. However there is nothing stopping some company setting up a company in a third country, funding it indirectly and

Nvidia's fear of getting slapped with a fine. However there is nothing stopping some company setting up a company in a third country, funding it indirectly and getting them to build a cluster for deepseek/others to access. After all the location of the servers isn't really an in surmountable problem, so long as the training data is closeby.

londons_explore 2y ago
> Nvidia's fear of getting slapped with a fine. I suspect these export restrictions are less black-and-white than you imagine. If Nvidia shipped a lot of GPU's to, say, Brazil, and they ended up being rented to american startups for AI, all would be fine. But if those same GPU's in Brazil ended up rented to Chinese companies who used them to make state of the art models, then Nvidia would get a big fine and the datacenter would magically catch fire[1]. [1]: https://www.elinfor.com/news/asml-supplier-is-caught-in-a-fire-and-delivery-of-euv-lithography-machines-will-be-delayed-early-next-year-p-10958 https://www.elinfor.com/news/asml-supplier-is-caught-in-a-fi...
- dismas 2y ago
  > I suspect these export restrictions are less black-and-white than you imagine. They definitely are, but things like Golden Sentry and Blue Lantern (amongst other Dual Use Monitoring regimes) can also still look for these sorts of uses. But yes, there's lots of examples of "Country X can't do Y, so we go to country Z and work with them to do Y" sorts of bypasses. Still increases the amount of work required if they want something NATSEC related to work on.
- KaiserPro 2y ago
  > I suspect these export restrictions are less black-and-white than you imagine Oh I agree wholeheartedly. But that also is a risk, because if its not binary its much harder to prove that you didn't know the ultimate destination. There are direct sales to high volume customers, like meta, aws, HP, Dell et al, then there are sales to large resellers. Those will all do due diligence checks to make sure that its not going to china. Then there is the channel which are smaller players that either buy smaller volumes (ie a few thousand) or buy from resellers. whilst nominally those companies are vetted and audited, there are lots of them, so its perfectly possible to buy from lots of channel partners and avoid suspicion

londons_explore 2y ago

> Nvidia's fear of getting slapped with a fine. I suspect these export restrictions are less black-and-white than you imagine. If Nvidia shipped a lot of GPU's to, say, Brazil, and they ended up being rented to american startups for AI, all would be fine. But if those same GPU's in Brazil ended up rented to Chinese companies who used them to make state of the art models, then Nvidia would get a big fine and the datacenter would magically catch fire[1]. [1]: https://www.elinfor.com/news/asml-supplier-is-caught-in-a-fire-and-delivery-of-euv-lithography-machines-will-be-delayed-early-next-year-p-10958 https://www.elinfor.com/news/asml-supplier-is-caught-in-a-fi...

dismas 2y ago
> I suspect these export restrictions are less black-and-white than you imagine. They definitely are, but things like Golden Sentry and Blue Lantern (amongst other Dual Use Monitoring regimes) can also still look for these sorts of uses. But yes, there's lots of examples of "Country X can't do Y, so we go to country Z and work with them to do Y" sorts of bypasses. Still increases the amount of work required if they want something NATSEC related to work on.
KaiserPro 2y ago
> I suspect these export restrictions are less black-and-white than you imagine Oh I agree wholeheartedly. But that also is a risk, because if its not binary its much harder to prove that you didn't know the ultimate destination. There are direct sales to high volume customers, like meta, aws, HP, Dell et al, then there are sales to large resellers. Those will all do due diligence checks to make sure that its not going to china. Then there is the channel which are smaller players that either buy smaller volumes (ie a few thousand) or buy from resellers. whilst nominally those companies are vetted and audited, there are lots of them, so its perfectly possible to buy from lots of channel partners and avoid suspicion