Chinese technology giants, including Alibaba and ByteDance, are increasingly training their most advanced artificial intelligence models in Southeast Asia, taking advantage of overseas data centers equipped with high-end Nvidia GPUs, according to new reporting by the Financial Times. The shift reflects how leading AI labs in China are navigating U.S. export controls by leasing compute from non-Chinese operators based in Singapore and Malaysia.
Over the past year, Alibaba’s Qwen and ByteDance’s Doubao large language models have risen into the top tier of global LLM benchmarks. Allegedly, both have been trained, at least in part, using Nvidia accelerators located in offshore clusters.
