Get the latest tech news

TikTok’s AI efforts reportedly exploit loopholes to use premium Nvidia chips

The US has banned companies like Nvidia from selling their most advanced AI chips to China since 2022. But if loopholes exist, profit-hungry corporations will find and exploit them. A bombshell report on Thursday details how Oracle allows TikTok owner ByteDance to rent Nvidia’s most advanced chips to train AI models on US soil.

ByteDance, which many US lawmakers believe has direct ties to the Chinese government, is reportedly renting US-based servers containing Nvidia’s coveted H100 chips from US cloud computing company Oracle to train AI models. ByteDance’s Project Texas initiative, which the company claims siloes off TikTok’s US operations from its Chinese leadership to allay US fears, is at the heart of the arrangement. But even if the US manages to shut down that exploit, The Information says it wouldn’t cover Chinese cloud providers like Tencent and Alibaba from buying Nvidia’s chips and using them to train AI models in their own US-based data centers.

Get the Android app