Chinese AI Companies Dodge U.S. Chip Curbs by Flying Suitcases of Hard Drives Abroad

Chinese AI companies are finding ways around U.S. export restrictions on advanced Nvidia chips by physically transporting large volumes of training data—sometimes in suitcases—to countries like Malaysia.

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There, they rent access to high-powered Nvidia GPUs in local data centers to train their AI models. Once training is complete, they bring the refined models back to China. This strategy allows them to avoid directly importing restricted chips, effectively sidestepping U.S. efforts to limit China’s access to cutting-edge AI hardware.