The US has banned the sale of the latest artificial intelligence chips to China, but ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, has found a way to get the chips through Oracle. This is reported by The Information. By renting servers from Oracle in the US, ByteDance is training its artificial intelligence models using Nvidia H100 chips. This practice is technically permissible because Oracle simply leases the chips in the US rather than selling them to companies in China.
This scheme allows ByteDance to avoid restrictions imposed by the US government on the sale of chips to China. The Biden administration has tightened controls on chip exports to China to prevent possible use of AI for military or intelligence purposes.
ByteDance already trains its AI models in the US, but there are questions about transferring the manufactured models back to China.