19 August 2026

Chinese firms access advanced Nvidia chips remotely via Southeast Asia

• ByteDance and Tencent have obtained computing power from Nvidia's most advanced chips by renting access through data centers in Malaysia, Thailand, and other Southeast Asian countries.
• U.S. export controls ban shipping these chips directly to China, but do not restrict remote access to them, creating a legal loophole that Chinese AI companies are exploiting.
• New Chinese AI models from Moonshot, DeepSeek, and Alibaba have improved significantly in recent months, with access to overseas compute identified as a key factor in their advancement.
• Proposed U.S. legislation called the Remote Access Security Act would expand export controls to cover cloud-based access to advanced chips, though it has not yet passed the Senate.

How it was covered

The AlgorithmMIT Technology Review

ByteDance and Tencent each received about 10,000 H200 processors from Nvidia on the Chinese mainland. The newsletter also noted a new Chinese AI model could assist both defenders and hackers.

Reported by CNBC