Summary
From the article:
A Bloomberg News analysis of investment approvals, tender documents and company filings shows that Chinese firms aim to install more than 115,000 Nvidia Corp. AI chips in some three dozen data centers across the country’s western deserts. Operators in Xinjiang intend to house the lion’s share of those processors in a single compound — which, if they can pull it off, could be used to train foundational large-language models like those of Chinese AI startup DeepSeek.
The complex as envisioned would still be dwarfed by the scale of AI infrastructure in the US, but it would significantly boost China’s computing prowess as President Xi Jinping pushes for technological breakthroughs. Such a project also would raise serious concerns for officials in Washington, who restricted leading-edge Nvidia chip sales to China in 2022 over worries that advanced AI could give Beijing a military edge.
Yet the Chinese documents contain no explanation of how companies plan to acquire the chips, which cannot be legally purchased without licenses from the US government, permits that haven’t been given. The companies listed in the filings, state officials and central government representatives in Beijing declined to comment when asked to explain.
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None of those familiar with the US probes said they previously knew of the data center buildout in Xinjiang. All said that while they believe there are indeed banned chips in China, they’re not aware of an illicit trade network sophisticated enough to procure more than 100,000 such processors and direct that hardware to a centralized location.
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To be sure, Bloomberg News has not found evidence that China has amassed, or can amass, 115,000 banned Nvidia chips — nor evidence that smaller volumes of restricted semiconductors that US officials believe are in the country have been directed to centralized locations.
And yet in Yiwu, the construction goes on.
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The authorities in Xinjiang are particularly suspicious of foreigners due to Western allegations of human-rights abuses against ethnic Uyghurs. Interview requests sent to eight data center operators in Yiwu were ignored, rejected or agreed to and then cancelled at short notice. The Xinjiang government and Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), the central government ministry overseeing data center development, didn’t reply to Bloomberg requests for comment.