Without obtaining an export license from the U.S. Department of Commerce, Nvidia cannot supply its high-end H100 and the latest H200 GPUs to China-based entities. This license will hardly be granted, at least not for hundreds of such GPUs. However, these GPUs are seemingly available in China, with one alleged businessman bragging that he had smuggled in over two dozen H200-based Supermicro servers with hundreds of H200 GPUs inside.
The unidentified businessman allegedly obtained as many as 25 Supermicro servers, each with eight Nvidia H200 GPUs, amounting to 200 Hopper GPUs. Two hundred H200 GPUs are not enough to train a sophisticated large language model, but they are good enough to conduct research by various research institutions and develop software at a startup. Companies can start developing their projects on smuggled H200 hardware and then run them in a remote cloud data center, again violating U.S. sanctions against China.
