As the United States tightens restrictions on China’s AI development, Chinese AI companies are exploring creative ways to bypass these limitations.
According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, some companies are now smuggling hard drives into Malaysia to train their AI models without directly violating U.S. export controls on advanced Nvidia chips destined for China.
In one instance, four Chinese tech workers flew from Beijing to Kuala Lumpur, each carrying 15 hard drives loaded with 80 terabytes of data—totalling around 4.8 petabytes.
That’s enough data to train several large-scale language models. The operation was carefully planned over several months, with the engineers opting to physically transport the data rather than transferring it online to avoid detection.
To keep a low profile, they split the hard drives among the four travellers to prevent suspicion from Malaysian customs.
Once in Malaysia, the team headed to a local data centre where their company had rented 300 Nvidia AI servers. There, they processed the data and worked on building their AI model, effectively sidestepping the U.S. restrictions.