US sanctions ignite booming black market for Nvidia AI chips in China

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In brief: What do you do when US sanctions prevent the purchase of high-performance Nvidia AI GPUs? In China, universities and businesses are turning to underground dealers to secure these chips, and paying a premium to get their hands on them. In September last year, the US further tightened sanctions against China by instructing Nvidia and AMD to stop selling their high-performance AI-focused GPUs to the country (and Russia), a restriction aimed at preventing the US companies' top hardware from being used by or diverted to military users and finding their way into the nation's supercomputers. The sanctions mean that...