Chinese engineers are now making trips to Malaysia not to transport chips, but data — using backpacks filled with hard drives. Previously, many Chinese startups relied on the black market by purchasing Nvidia chips; however, after tightening U.S. sanctions, the situation has changed. Instead of importing components, they are now forced to carry important information directly. This is reported by WSJ.
It is reported that recently, four employees from a Chinese artificial intelligence project traveled from Beijing to Kuala Lumpur. Each of them carried 15 hard drives containing approximately 80 terabytes of data needed for training models.
It seems the entire operation was carefully planned: transferring data this way proved preferable, as transmitting over the internet would have taken a lot of time and could have drawn unwanted attention. In Malaysia, the staff rented 300 servers with Nvidia GPUs, on which, apparently, new models are currently being trained.
So, they resort to all sorts of tricks to support the project — soon, they might even start delivering data by pigeons. It has become a necessity to use any available methods to fight for success.