Ever since Chinese company DeepSeek stunned the tech world by demonstrating OpenAI-level of performance at a fraction of the cost, there have been murmurs in the US about preventing the Chinese from developing such capabilities in AI — Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei went as far as to call for export controls of NVIDIA’s most advanced GPUs to China, which would slow down the development of AI technology in the country, and allow the US to create a sizable lead. But yet another tech CEO from the US believes that these export controls won’t work.
Groq CEO Jonathan Ross has said that export controls of GPUs for Chinese firms won’t work because Chinese firms will be able to easily get around them. Groq provides cloud services for fast AI inference, and counts BlackRock, Cisco Investments and Samsung Catalyst Fund among its investors.
“Why would (Chinese companies) try and smuggle in GPUs when all they’d have to do is log into any cloud provider and rent GPUs,” Ross said in an interview. “This is like the biggest gaping hole in the whole way that export control is done. You can literally log in, swipe credit card, and just pay and get GPUs to use,” he said.
“(The export control laws are) good, but the problem is there’s like, it’s like the Maginot line, you just go around it. So you need to like seal it up a little more. There’s a little bit of room left to go here. I’m not aware of where it would be an export issue. I do know that many people log into cloud providers and just use them from remote,” he added.
“So we actually block IP addresses from China, and I believe we might be unique in doing that. It’s also a little bit fruitless because, you know, someone could just like rent a server anywhere and then log into us from there. And then there’s nothing we can check. So I don’t know that IP addresses are really the right way to do it anyway. I think we need something more sophisticated, but I mean, yeah, it’s a big cheese, Swiss cheese wall,” he said.
Jonathan Ross seemed to be suggesting that China didn’t actually need to own GPUs in order to have access to them. There are plenty of companies offering GPUs on rent on the cloud, and a Chinese company could easily cloak its identity, and rent GPU time from anywhere in the world. If it can spread its GPU usage across different companies and locations, it might not trip off any internal systems that GPU providers might have to prevent too much usage from a particular source, and be able to train its models. As such, the alarm around preventing the export of GPUs to China might just be unnecessary — with GPUs already out in the wild, it might be impossible to prevent the Chinese AI companies from getting their hands on them.