THE NVIDIA AI GPU BLACK MARKET | Investigating Smuggling, Corruption, & Governments

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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.

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TIMESTAMPS

00:00:00 - The NVIDIA AI GPU Black Market
00:06:06 - WE NEED YOUR HELP
00:07:41 - A BIG ADVENTURE
00:10:10 - Ignored by the US
00:11:46 - BACKGROUND: Why the GBan
00:16:04 - TIMELINE
00:21:32 - H20 Revenue Share with the US
00:26:01 - Calculating BANNED GPUs
00:29:31 - OUR INFORMANTS
00:31:47 - THE SMUGGLING PIPELINE
00:33:39 - PART 1: HONG KONG Demand Drivers
00:43:14 - PART 1: How Suppliers Get the GPUs
00:48:18 - PART 1: GPU Rich and GPU Poor
00:56:19 - PART 1: DATACENTER with Banned GPUs
01:06:19 - PART 1: Chinese Military and Huawei GPUs
01:09:48 - PART 1: How China Circumvents the Ban
01:19:30 - PART 1: GPU MARKET in Hong Kong
01:32:39 - WIRING MONEY TO CHINA
01:36:29 - PART 2: CHINA Smuggling Process
01:43:26 - PART 3: SHENZHEN GPU MIDDLEMEN
01:50:22 - PART 3: AMD and INTEL GPUs Unwanted
01:56:34 - PART 4: THE GPU FENCE
02:06:01 - PART 4: FINDING the GPUs
02:15:12 - PART 4: THE FIXER IC Supplier
02:21:12 - PART 5: GPU WAREHOUSE
02:27:17 - PART 6: GPU MOD SHOP for VRAM and REPAIR
02:34:52 - PART 6: BUILD a Custom AI GPU
02:56:33 - PART 7: FACTORY
03:01:01 - PART 8: TAIWAN and SINGAPORE
03:02:06 - PART 9: SMUGGLER
03:05:11 - LEGALITY of Buying and Selling
03:08:05 - CORRUPTION: NVIDIA and Governments
03:26:51 - SIGNOFF

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Steve Burke: Host, Writing, Lead Editing
Vitalii Makhnovets: Editing
Tim Phetdara: Editing
Andrew Coleman: Editing, Graphics
Tannen Williams: Camera
Ben Benson: Research & Writing