ByteDance circumvents sanctions, spending $2.5 billion to lease 'super servers' with 36,000 Blackwell GPUs in Malaysia.

Under U.S. export control laws, current regulations primarily govern where hardware is shipped to and do not prohibit Chinese companies from leasing computing power remotely from neutral countries like Malaysia or Indonesia.

In the tech world, embargoes are sometimes just a geographical problem that tech giants always find a way to solve. Recently, a report from the Wall Street Journal revealed a highly clever move by ByteDance – the parent company of TikTok – in quietly acquiring the power of Nvidia's Blackwell superchip without directly owning it.

Instead of attempting the impossible task of sourcing goods from China, ByteDance has chosen Malaysia as its strategic "launchpad." Specifically, the company is aiming to lease a massive supercomputer cluster worth up to $2.5 billion, containing approximately 36,000 Nvidia Blackwell B200 GPUs located in partner Aolani Cloud's data centers. Notably, this system comprises 500 NVL72 GB200 racks – the most powerful performance "monsters" on the planet today, coveted even by Western giants.

What's most surprising is that the deal is completely legal. Under US export control laws, current regulations primarily govern where hardware is shipped to and do not prohibit Chinese companies from leasing computing power remotely in neutral countries like Malaysia or Indonesia. Nvidia has also stated that its cloud partners are rigorously vetted, and ByteDance's use of this infrastructure is part of a global cloud economy model.

This move not only gives ByteDance the cutting-edge "weapon" to train next-generation AI models but also demonstrates a reality: in the AI ​​era, geopolitical boundaries are gradually blurring due to cloud computing. If the US tightens its grip even further, they risk losing the lucrative Southeast Asian market to other competitors. Currently, ByteDance is believed to have already made initial deposits to secure its leading position in the global AI race, a game where whoever has more Blackwell GPUs wins.