"In early March, four Chinese engineers flew to Malaysia from Beijing, each carrying a suitcase packed with 15 hard drives. The drives contained 80 terabytes of spreadsheets, images and video clips for training an artificial-intelligence model.
At a Malaysian data center, the engineers’ employer had rented about 300 servers containing advanced Nvidia chips. The engineers fed the data into the servers, planning to build the AI model and bring it back home.
Since 2022, the U.S. has tightened the noose around the sale of high-end AI chips and other technology to China over national-security concerns. Yet Chinese companies have made advances using workarounds.
In some cases, Chinese AI developers have been able to substitute domestic chips for the American ones. Another workaround is to smuggle AI hardware into China through third countries. But people in the industry say that has become more difficult in recent months, in part because of U.S. pressure.
That is pushing Chinese companies to try a further option: bringing their data outside China so they can use American AI chips in places such as Southeast Asia and the Middle East."
https://www.wsj.com/tech/china-ai-chip-curb-suitcases-7c47dab1