NVIDIA (NVDA) GPUs have become so in-demand for so-called “AI” workloads that a black market has emerged around them.
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NVIDIA (NVDA) GPUs have become so in-demand for so-called “AI” workloads that a black market has emerged around them. Where there’s prohibition, there’s smuggling, and there’s money to be made for everyone in the chain.
We found smugglers, users, fences, middlemen, and institutions in China, Taiwan, and the US involved in this pipeline flowing export controlled GPUs to China. This is in violation of US Government law, which now includes imposed numerous restrictions on semiconductor processing capabilities, making legitimate export of high-end GPUs to Chinese companies or governments impossible without rarely-granted licenses.
But while this is going on, the US Government, NVIDIA, and AMD have been negotiating a cut of sales of two specific models of GPU in order to unblock over $6 billion in combined lost revenue between the companies.
We also spoke with a factory about how they make GPUs for Yeston. Yeston is not involved in the black market and doesn’t even make the high-end GPUs that are banned, but it gives us important insight as to how video cards are made and what the process is.
The process is the same for all cards, and this means we can show a factory without issues from NVIDIA for a brand which makes high-end NVIDIA GPUs. COMPREHENSIVE TIMELINE: https://gamersnexus.net/gpus-news/tim… This is our first full-length, highly produced movie we’ve ever created.
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- TIMESTAMPS 00:00:00
- The NVIDIA AI GPU Black Market 00:06:06
- WE NEED YOUR HELP 00:07:41
- A BIG ADVENTURE 00:10:10
- Ignored by the US 00:11:46
- BACKGROUND: Why the Ban 00:16:04
- TIMELINE 00:21:32
- H20 15 Percent Revenue Share with the US 00:26:01
- Calculating BANNED GPUs 00:29:31
- OUR INFORMANTS 00:31:47
- THE SMUGGLING PIPELINE 00:33:39
- PART 1: HONG KONG Demand Drivers 00:43:14
- PART 1: How Suppliers Get the GPUs 00:48:18
- PART 1: GPU Rich and GPU Poor 00:56:19\
- PART 1: DATACENTER with Banned GPUs 01:06:19
- PART 1: Chinese Military and Huawei GPUs 01:09:48
- PART 1: How China Circumvents the Ban 01:19:30
- PART 1: GPU MARKET in Hong Kong 01:32:39
- WIRING MONEY TO CHINA 01:36:29
- PART 2: CHINA Smuggling Process 01:43:26
- PART 3: SHENZHEN GPU MIDDLEMEN 01:50:22
- PART 3: AMD and INTEL GPUs Unwanted 01:56:34
- PART 4: THE GPU FENCE 02:06:01
- PART 4: FINDING the GPUs 02:15:12
- PART 4: THE FIXER IC Supplier 02:21:12
- PART 5: GPU WAREHOUSE 02:27:17
- PART 6: GPU MOD SHOP for VRAM and REPAIR 02:34:52
- PART 6: BUILD a Custom AI GPU 02:56:33
- PART 7: FACTORY 03:01:01
- PART 8: TAIWAN and SINGAPORE 03:02:06
- PART 9: SMUGGLER 03:05:11
- LEGALITY of Buying and Selling 03:08:05
- CORRUPTION: NVIDIA and Governments 03:26:51
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- Steve Burke: Host, Writing, Lead Editing Vitalii Makhnovets: Editing Tim Phetdara
- Editing Andrew Coleman
- Editing, Graphics Tannen Williams
- Camera Ben Benson: Research & Writing
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