NVIDIA (NVDA) GPUs have become so in-demand for so-called "AI" workloads that a black market has emerged around them. Where there's prohibition, there's smuggling, and there's money to be made for everyone in the chain. We found smugglers, users, fences, middlemen, and institutions in China, Taiwan, and the US involved in this pipeline flowing export controlled GPUs to China. This is in violation of US Government law, which now includes imposed numerous restrictions on semiconductor processing capabilities, making legitimate export of high-end GPUs to Chinese companies or governments impossible without rarely-granted licenses. But while this is going on, the US Government, NVIDIA, and AMD have been negotiating a cut of sales of two specific models of GPU in order to unblock over $6 billion in combined lost revenue between the companies.
We also spoke with a factory about how they make GPUs for Yeston. Yeston is not involved in the black market and doesn't even make the high-end GPUs that are banned, but it gives us important insight as to how video cards are made and what the process is. The process is the same for all cards, and this means we can show a factory without issues from NVIDIA for a brand which makes high-end NVIDIA GPUs.