Chip smuggler details how a single loophole is letting banned South Korean RAM slip into China’s AI labs

Advanced memory chips barred under strict export controls are slipping across borders directly into Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) laboratories, guided by a regulatory blind spot in international trade rules, a report has said. A memory smuggler has reportedly revealed how export-controlled High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) manufactured in South Korea by Samsung and SK Hynix reaches mainland China. Under current US and South Korean trade restrictions, standalone exports of cutting-edge HBM units to China are outright prohibited. Yet the smuggler, who runs a chip design venture, identified an easy detour around the embargo, The Information reports.

The report (via Tom’s Hardware) details that regulatory export controls measure only the raw computing performance of the server processor itself, without evaluating secondary components attached to the board.