More claims are emerging that developers in China are using US-based cloud services to bypass measures intended to block its access to advanced chips and other technologies for accelerating AI development.
The White House started imposing export restrictions on advanced chips to China nearly two years ago, extending them last year to effectively cut off the Chinese market from high-end GPUs and accelerators.
The reason for these sanctions, at least according to the US government, is to prevent Beijing's military from gaining access to high-performance computing power that might be used to develop AI and weaponize it.
As The Register reported earlier this year, some Chinese organizations were found to be buying or trying to buy access to export-controlled chips such as Nvidia's high-end GPUs operating from datacenters in the US, neatly side-stepping the restrictions without explicitly breaking export sanctions.
Reuters now reports that publicly available tender documents posted on Chinese databases over the past year show that several China-based organizations have sought access to restricted US technologies.
It claims that some of the documents explicitly name Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a cloud service provider from which they are buying services, though it appears the access may have been facilitated through Chinese intermediary companies rather than directly from AWS.
Amazon denies any wrongdoing. "AWS complies with all applicable US laws, including trade laws, regarding the provision of AWS services inside and outside of China," a spokesperson told The Register.
The documents reveal that organizations involved in attempting to gain access to resources for AI processing include Zhejiang Lab, a state-sponsored research institution; Shenzhen University, a government-funded research university; Sichuan University; and the Suzhou Institute of Advanced Research at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC).
Some of these organizations are said to have been interested in accessing OpenAI tools via Microsoft's Azure cloud platform. We contacted the company for comment.
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Shenzhen University spent ¥200,000 yuan ($27,996) on an AWS account to gain access to cloud servers equipped with Nvidia's A100 and H100 accelerator chips for an unspecified project, according to Reuters, which said its findings demonstrate the lengths some in China will go to in order to access the most advanced resources needed for generative AI models.
The US government has steadily ratcheted up its restrictions to close off any loopholes, but The Register reported in March how some Chinese companies blacklisted by the US from acquiring certain technologies were still able to rent access to them, such as Nvidia's A100 GPUs.
We asked the US Commerce Department if it was aware of these latest activities and whether it was considering any additional measures. We will update if we receive a response.
However, some in the semiconductor industry have been critical of the White House's approach to China over high tech. In July, the former head of chipmaking equipment giant ASML said the US-China "chip wars" are mainly ideological in nature. His ex-employer is caught in the turmoil because of US restrictions on exporting ASML's products to China, one of its largest markets. ®