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I'm confused. Wasn't there sanctions against Chinese companies about Hopper GPUs? Are they just admitting that they had access to H100 against the US sanctions?!

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Just the H100, the H800 is a region-specific version of the card for china with shitty nvlink bandwidth which makes it rougher for making big clusters, but deepseek was able to mitigate the impact of that by being clever (rumored to have made significant use of PTX assembly instead of just using CUDA, we'll probably find out in the releases this week)

It isn't illegal for chinese companies to buy H100 cards. It is illegal for USA companies to sell them to China. So the "admit" part wouldn't be on Chinas side.

It's also totally legal to sell h100 cards to a country that is very close to China.

Unrelated, it's always impressed me how Singapore buys 15% of the world's h100's. Really is the AI development capital of the world.

Not really Singapore is a trading hub a lot of multi national companies have regional offices or head offices in Singapore so if the head office buys anything for any where the purchase will show up as Singapore. Despite Nvidia showing such a large revenue from Singapore actual number of gpu shipped to Singapore is not that high. Not that some of the gpus are not going China but their is a valid reason for the Nvidia Singapore revenue numbers.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/deepseek-gpu-smug...

I can't tell if you're insinuating that Singapore is a pass-through for H100's heading towards China or whether there is some significant development taking place in Singapore that I'm unaware of?

> Singapore plays a vital role in Nvidia's global business, accounting for 22% of its revenue as of Q3 FY2025, up from 9% in Q3 FY2023 when the first significant restrictions on AI GPU sales to Chinese were introduced

I suggest that you read this comment, which explains why your quote is misleading: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43159362

It’s funny how this claim is able to make the rounds. I originally heard it here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_1f-o0nqpEI

Singapore is the billing location, not the shipping location, which makes sense because they’re the HQ of a lot of companies in the region.

Also breaking the law to growth-hack happens all the time, see Uber.

And the British East India Company

H800 is the export variant that they had access to. They directly reference it in the repo:

>Achieving up to 3000 GB/s in memory-bound configuration and 580 TFLOPS in computation-bound configuration on H800 SXM5, using CUDA 12.6.

H20 is a Hopper GPU, and they are allowed to be sold in China.

Can everyone stop downvoting people just for asking questions - this isn’t Stack Overflow!

The secret ingredient is smuggling.

I'd be very careful when using that word in this situation. If China wants X, and another country has X, who are you to say they shouldn't trade with each other?

Donald Trump?

Why does anyone need to be careful using that word? What a bizarre way to try to intimidate someone over speech.

Another country has X because they were expected (in the terms of their purchase) to not sell it to an adversary. So yes they’re supposed to honor that agreement and are not supposed to trade that particular thing X with each other. Not doing so invites sanctions and other consequences. Is it worth the risk just to do business with a dictatorship? Probably not.

If free citizens in the USofA have {X} and China has sanctioned Germany from having {X} should the free citizens of the USofA honor that agreement they made with China to not sell to Germany when they acquired {X} from China?

How about if they got {X} from Mexico ( who got it from Agnes .. ) ?

Some purchases come with strict protocols coded into contracts. Try buying F-35 and selling it to China, for example; See what happens. Other risk you not being able to purchase for yourself anymore and possible sanctions. H100 and others are under export control, I'm just not sure if it's an explicit export control or automatic, like what famously made PowerMac G4 a weapon export. I found a source there was an executive order for hardware exceeding 1e26 floating point operations or 1e23 integer operations. In any case, if an item is under export control that means paperwork and, if you're eligible to purchase, paperwork includes you also signing what you can and cannot do with the item purchased.

I feel the same about capital controls and crypto

People say “it’s used for money laundering” as if we’re supposed to be on China’s side about restricting people’s ability to move money out of the country over certain amounts

Like, oh you’re against freedom from a repressive regime? Or oh you’re only against it when it’s the American government restricting US citizens flow of capital? like I’m confused, pick a lane

Capital controls are obsoleted under any context

It's not intimidation, its merely correcting and an inappropriate usage of a word. What exactly do you think smuggling is?

Smuggling is normally thought of as hiding something when crossing a border/checkpoint. In this case, it would simply be nvidia violating US sanctions. The goods would have never entered or exited the USA so it's a strange or incorrect use of the word smuggling.

We should forget about the sanction BS … it damages US industry when it has money to make while motivating others to be more self reliant and build the product to compete …

Do you think that would be morally wrong? Honest question.

No, especially considering that they open sourced everything. (not OP)

Also, they could have outsourced the computation to a subsidiary company in the US, I suppose.

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