In China, you can run workloads in the cloud on an Nvidia GPU for less than in the US, showing that powerful Nvidia accelerators are readily available in the country despite the Americans’ trade alliance.

Small Chinese cloud providers charge around $6 per hour to rent a server with eight Nvidia A100 accelerators domestically. In the US, similar providers charge $10 for the same server. Servers with other accelerators such as the Nvidia H100 are also common.

Easy to smuggle

This shows that the US trade embargo is not enough. Sales of Nvidia A100 accelerators have been restricted since 2022, and the Nvidia H100 has never been legally available in China. Yet GPUs are widely used, both by consumer vendors and in cloud instances. Arstechnica knows this.

Smuggling GPUs across national borders is apparently not such a big problem given their size. It is estimated that there are more than 100,000 Nvidia H100 accelerators in circulation in China.

Slowing down of AI development

In theory, Nvidia sells its chips to trusted partners and tries to comply with US sanctions. In practice, this doesn’t seem to be working so well. With its embargo rules, the US wants to prevent China from gaining a lead in AI development using Western technology. The Americans are making things more difficult for the Chinese, but the trade restrictions are obviously not watertight.