4 Chinese engineers smuggled 80 TB of AI data in backpacks to Malaysia
An incredible technological odyssey is unfolding right now! Chinese engineers found a surprisingly analog way to bypass digital restrictions. Imagine: 4 employees of a Chinese AI startup are flying from Beijing to Kuala Lumpur. And each carries 15 hard drives in their backpack! In total — 80 terabytes of data for neural network training.
This is not a tech thriller script, but a real situation reported by the Wall Street Journal. A real digital smuggler of the 21st century looks like an ordinary engineer with a heavy backpack! The operation was carefully planned. Transferring such a volume of data via internet would have taken too much time and inevitably attracted unwanted regulatory attention.
Upon arrival in Malaysia, the team rented 300 Nvidia servers for training their models. And according to the Wall Street Journal, this team is still in Malaysia and continues training their AI models to this day. While Chinese companies could previously rely on black markets for buying chips, they are now forced to export the data itself to where computational power is available.
