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Comment by int32_64 | Hacker News Reader

What's strange in this discussion of chips and export bans is there's been zero discussion of cloud access, I guess networked computers are difficult for America's gerontocrats to understand.

I've rented H100s no problem on American servers and there's no KYC or anything, they let anybody do it.

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Yes, it’s easy, cheap and it works. Maybe they need a super big volume and all the GPUs in the same space, to guarantee minimum latency.

OpenAi, Anthropic, etc have access to specialized network topologies from high profile relationships with cloud providers. I don't think you can get anything like that off the shelf.

If the CIA shows up, Amazon is 100% going to let them rootkit those boxes. They might even have a way to do it without rebooting your servers.

To obtain what? Deepseek's newest open source model before they release it?

You think they’re only going to eavesdrop?

You’re mistaking them for the FBI. CIA has destabilized entire countries.

You can’t really spend $500k on AWS without doing some form of identity disclosure.

A shell company complete with directors of your preferred nationality is trivial to procure for relatively small amounts of money.

That's fair, I'm also not accessing these resources from Russia or North Korea so I imagine there's different precautions for different countries.

sure but to do this at scale you need better control of the networking layer than they typically give you, and there will definitely be KYC at a certain point in the process

I don't think DeepSeek could do that in the volume they need

It’s always the bandwidth. Noisy neighbors or part of the Eight Fallacies and the cloud tries to pretend they don’t exist.

I mean, I thought the paranoia was about China making their own models with their own chips. If they're renting USA models via the cloud, that's "good".

You should really seek to actually understand an issue before you comment so arrogantly.

US authorities are ok with Chinese companies accessing GPUs in overseas DCs because those DCs will still be subject any US export controls. Right now, we don’t really care if Chinese companies are building tier-2 LLMs on US gear. If China invades Taiwan or frontier models approach AGI, we will shut down those Malaysian and Thai data centers overnight.

Traditional social norms are reversed online because there is no threat of immediate violence. Arrogance gets attention. Politeness gets ignored. Don't be so harsh. It's just how this generation communicates.

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