Report: Chinese organizations use public cloud to access restricted AI chips

Multiple organizations in China have sought to rent high-end graphics cards from U.S. cloud providers, Reuters reported late Thursday.

The news agency learned of the procurement effort by reviewing publicly-available tender documents. Those are invitations that ask firms to submit bids for a contract, on this case artificial intelligence infrastructure purchases.

Under U.S. export controls that rolled out two years ago, Nvidia Corp. is prohibited from selling its high-end H100 and A100 graphics processing units to entitles in China. The principles also cover certain other data center chips optimized for AI workloads. But though such chips can’t be sold or transferred to entities based in China, leasing them via the cloud isn’t prohibited. 

The documents reviewed by Reuters indicate that not less than 11 Chinese organizations have sought access to “restricted U.S. technologies or cloud services.” Lots of those organizations planned to finish the transactions through intermediaries.

In response to Reuters, a university spent the equivalent of $28,000 to access Amazon Web Services Inc. instances equipped with A100 and H100 chips. In April, a research institute developing a custom large language model disclosed plans to spend an analogous sum on AWS infrastructure. It intended to make use of the hardware to power an AI model.

Microsoft Corp.’s competing Azure cloud was also named in the general public tender documents. In one among the filings, a university stated that it had purchased access to OpenAI models hosted on Azure. The deal covered 40 billion tokens’ value of AI processing capability.

Like Microsoft, AWS offers access to third-party AI models in its cloud. In response to Reuters, the Amazon.com Inc. unit published a lot of Chinese-language marketing documents that highlighted a possibility to check out “world-class AI models” on its platform. The news agency reported that among the marketing materials, which included blog posts, referenced Anthropic PBC’s Claude series of LLMs. 

Following the report, AWS updated dozens of blog posts with a note stating that not all its services can be found via its cloud regions in China. The Amazon unit told Reuters that “Amazon Bedrock customers are subject to Anthropic’s end user license agreement, which prohibits access to Claude in China each via Amazon’s Bedrock API (application programming interface) and via Anthropic’s own API.”

An AWS spokesperson said that “AWS complies with all applicable US laws, including trade laws, regarding the availability of AWS services inside and outdoors of China.”

The report comes as U.S. policymakers take steps to more closely regulate cloud-hosted AI models and chips.

In January, the Commerce Department proposed a rule that will require cloud providers to be more transparent about how customers use their platforms to coach AI models. The regulation would place a selected emphasis on AI models able to “malicious cyber-enabled activity.” More recently, lawmakers submitted a bill that will enable regulators to more closely scrutinize how technologies reminiscent of AI chips are accessed via the cloud. 

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