KUALA LUMPUR (June 18): Chinese engineers were flying suitcases of hard drives to Malaysia to train their artificial intelligence (AI) models at data centres equipped with advanced Nvidia chips, The Wall Street Journal reported.
In early March, four Chinese engineers flew to Malaysia from Beijing, each carrying a suitcase packed with 15 hard drives containing 80 terabytes of spreadsheets, images and video clips for training an AI model, according to the news site.
The engineers’ employer had rented about 300 servers containing advanced Nvidia chips to feed the data, build the AI model and bring it back home, a plan which took months of preparation, the WSJ said citing unidentified people involved in the plan.
Malaysia’s Ministry of Investment, Trade and Industry didn’t respond to the WSJ’s request for comment when the story was published on June 12. The ministry also did not provide a response to The Edge’s queries sent since Tuesday.
The workaround was executed at a time when the US was tightening its restriction to prevent China from having advanced chips crucial for AI and data centres as part of a broader trade war. China has been Malaysia’s biggest trading partner for more than a decade.
Malaysia has benefitted from a raft of foreign direct investments into data centres on the back of rising demand for advanced computing and AI. To date, close to five gigawatts of data centre capacity have been announced.
“As Nvidia and its vendors began to conduct stricter audits on the end users of AI chips, the Chinese company was asked by the Malaysian data centre late last year to work through a Malaysian entity, which the companies thought might trigger less scrutiny,” the WSJ reported.
The Chinese company registered an entity in Kuala Lumpur, listing three Malaysians as directors and an offshore holding company as its parent, the WSJ said citing a corporate registry document. However, the entities and Malaysians involved were not identified in the report.