One of China's largest entities involved in the AI race, ByteDance, has reportedly secured access to NVIDIA's Blackwell chips through a Malaysian cloud computing provider.
China's ByteDance Has Managed to Access High-End Blackwell B200 AI Chips From a Cloud Partner In Malaysia
The debate around US export controls and their impact on Chinese entities has surfaced several times in the past, especially under the Biden administration, when Beijing had easy access to NVIDIA's top-tier chips, notably the Hopper H100 and A100. Following the imposition of export controls, Chinese AI giants have found trouble in getting their hands on NVIDIA's hardware through 'direct' means, which is why they have employed several other techniques, which primarily include chip smuggling and renting. And now, according to a WSJ report, ByteDance appears to be working with a cloud firm in Malaysia to obtain B200 Blackwell chips.
It is reported that this is one of the ways Chinese AI giants have worked around US export controls, and that firms like Tencent, ByteDance, and others have invested in offshore cloud partners, mainly in Singapore, to obtain restricted hardware. ByteDance has been a key customer of Aolani, the Malaysian cloud firm we talked about earlier, and, interestingly, Aolani is also ranked as a "Tier-1" customer of NVIDIA, which means it has priority access to supply lines.
We reached out to NVIDIA for a statement, and here's what the company had to say:
By design, the export rules allow clouds to be built and operated outside controlled countries. Winning the business of those clouds will decide the AI race and will bring tens of billions of dollars and high paying jobs home. Export controls forfeited the world's second largest commercial market to foreign competitors, and America cannot afford to lose all of Asia next.
All NVIDIA cloud partners are evaluated and cleared by NVIDIA's field operations, finance, and compliance teams before they can receive our products, directly or through an OEM.
- NVIDIA's spokesperson
There are a few ways for Chinese hyperscalers to advance their AI applications without access to NVIDIA's hardware, and even for chips like the H200, regulatory barriers to accessing them create delays that aren't worthwhile for the likes of ByteDance. That leaves such companies to adopt other effective measures, and in China, renting hardware is the safest option. This trend is more common among partners in SEA nations such as Singapore, Thailand, and the Philippines, since they aren't subject to BIS export restriction policies.
Renting compute is so popular that companies have started to lean toward using these services instead of purchasing NVIDIA's hardware directly, opening new opportunities for "middlemen" who arrange the necessary DC infrastructure. While such efforts by Chinese AI giants aren't deemed 'unlawful' under US export policies, they raise the question of whether China is actually deprived of computing capabilities.
About the author: Muhammad Zuhair is a hardware and technology reporter for Wccftech, specializing in the semiconductor industry and the complex interplay between technology, manufacturing, and geopolitics. His coverage focuses on the corporate strategies and technological roadmaps of industry giants like TSMC, NVIDIA, Samsung, and Intel. Zuhair's expertise lies in deconstructing complex topics such as fabrication nodes (e.g., 2nm process), the economic impact of policies like the CHIPS Act, and the strategic development of AI infrastructure from NVIDIA, AMD and Intel.
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