Chinese tech giants may have found a way to bypass US blockade of Nvidia AI chips – The Times of India

Major Chinese technology companies are reportedly training their large AI models in data centres overseas to get around US restrictions that ban the sale of powerful Nvidia chips to China. In this way, some Chinese tech giants are bypassing US restrictions intended to slow their technological advancement, according to a report. The Financial Times, citing sources close to the matter, reported that companies such as Alibaba and TikTok parent ByteDance have been training their latest LLMs in offshore locations, primarily in data centres across Singapore and other Southeast Asian countries, for some time now. The report added that since April, when the US government banned the sale of Nvidia H20, a chip designed for the Chinese market, there has been a gradual rise in offshore training. This strategy enables Chinese companies to obtain the required computing power despite export restrictions, the report claims.

How non-Chinese data centres are helping Chinese companies to train AI

In a statement to FT, a 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.”Over the past year, Alibaba’s Qwen and ByteDance’s Doubao AI models have become some of the top-performing LLMs worldwide. Many developers outside China have also adopted Qwen as it is a freely available “open” model.Data centre clusters have also grown in Singapore and Malaysia, driven by…