Demand is booming in China for repair work on Nvidia chips that should not exist in the country at all.
Exporting Nvidia’s high-end artificial intelligence chips to China is forbidden, but a dozen or so companies offer repair services, Reuters reported. The news demonstrates the level of smuggling of Nvidia chipsets, with the government and military among the customers.
More positively, perhaps, from the West’s perspective, it reveals that China’s efforts to reach technological parity with Nvidia, the world’s top chip design company, remain some way off: The H100 and A100 chips which the repair shops are fixing are some years old, but remain in high demand despite the availability of domestically manufactured Huawei alternatives.
