By Nick Farrell
Publication Date: 2025-12-01 08:46:00
AI chip is full of holes
Chinese tech behemoths are hauling their prized AI models overseas to gorge on Nvidia’s finest chips while pretending everything is above board.
Alibaba and ByteDance have been parking their latest large language models in Southeast Asian data centres, according to two people who know exactly what is going on.
They said offshore training has steadily climbed since the US in April tried to choke sales of Nvidia’s H20 chips, which were meant to be China-only semiconductors.
One Singapore-based data centre operator said: “It’s an obvious choice to come here. You need the best chips to train the most cutting-edge models, and it’s all legally compliant.”
Alibaba’s Qwen and ByteDance’s Doubao models have muscled their way into the top ranks of global LLMs during the past year. Qwen is popping up outside China like mushrooms in spring because it is free and “open”, which is catnip for developers.
Singapore and Malaysia have seen data centre clusters explode amid surging Chinese demand. Many of these facilities sport high-end Nvidia gear similar to what US Big Tech uses to train its own monsters.
People familiar with the practice said Chinese companies usually lease space from foreign-owned data centres, which keeps everything compliant with US export rules since the Joe Biden-era “diffusion rule” meant to close this loophole was binned by President Donald Trump earlier this year.
DeepSeek is the anomaly. The…
