- Flying Petabytes de Data of AI is the last solution of China for strict American chip controls
- Physical smuggling hard drives now avoid surveillance and digital firewalls in multiple jurisdictions
- The Malaysian data centers rich in GPU are becoming the zero zone for the training of the Chinese in the high seas
As the United States continues to harden export restrictions on advanced AI chips, such as those produced by NVIDIA, Chinese companies of AI are resorting to a solution that feels almost analogous in the current digital world.
Instead of relying on online transfers or sanctioned hardware, some companies physically transport vast data sets on hard discs across borders.
A report of Wall Street Journal Claims that four Chinese technological workers recently flew to Malaysia, each with 15 hard -capacity hard drives, totaling an amazing 4.8 data petabytes, destined to train large language models.
Big Data continues to enter China despite the restrictions
US restrictions have made it increasingly difficult to acquire high -end GPU AI through legal channels.
Although Nvidia argues, “there is no evidence of chips diversion”, the ground reports suggest otherwise, with a black market for the smuggling Nvidia GPUs that prosper in China.
According to reports, some of these chips enter the country through subsidiaries and partners in neighboring nations.
However, that route is becoming more expensive and more risky due to the greater scrutiny and diplomatic pressure of Washington in these intermediate countries.
As a result, companies are changing tactics: instead of importing restricted chips, they are exporting massive training data volumes.
This is a complex and intensive process. Companies carefully plan the physical transport of data, distributing impulses to prevent customs detection.
They also rent servers rich in GPU in external countries, such as Malaysia, to process the data.
An example involves a Chinese company that used its subsidiary registered in Singapore to sign a data center contract. However, Malaysia’s partner then insisted on the Local Registry to avoid regulatory pressure, since Singapore began to harden his own controls.
Despite the increase in the efforts of US agencies, application gaps and logistics lagoons continue to be exploited. While sending data on hard drives may seem outdated, avoids bandwidth limitations and digital surveillance.
The use of hard drives, ranging from large SSDs matrices to high capacity external HDDs, is essential for these covert transfers.
Even so, he raises a question: why not use magnetic tape, especially since modern LTO-10 formats can store up to 30 TB without compressing and 75TB tablets?
The answer probably lies in practicality. Tape solutions require specialized hardware for reading/writing and lack the convenience of high-end Plug-And-Play HDDs commonly used today.
