Google, Microsoft Help Chinese Firms Skirt Ban on Nvidia Chips

U.S. export controls forbid Chinese firms from buying Nvidia’s advanced artificial intelligence chips. But companies in China can still gain access to some of those chips by renting Nvidia-powered servers at data centers outside China from Google, Microsoft and other global firms—underlining a gap in U.S. export rules.

Both Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure are offering to rent Nvidia’s AI chips to Chinese companies, including AI startups, for use in data centers outside China. But apart from the biggest U.S. tech giants, there is a whole sector of smaller cloud providers specializing in offering access to Nvidia-powered servers around the world, and their services are available to Chinese customers. Some of these cloud providers are based in the U.S., but numerous others are based in Europe and Asia.