Key facts
- NVIDIA's Latin America executive Marcio Aguiar denied allegations of chip smuggling to China via the region.
- The executive stated NVIDIA refuses large chip orders from unfamiliar countries without proper documentation.
- AI firm Anthropic previously alleged Chinese labs used smuggled processors for AI advancements.
- Huawei is considering deploying its Ascend AI chips in Latin America for cloud and AI services.
- Huawei's Ascend 950 chips are in early deployment stages in China, with buyers including Alibaba and ByteDance.
NVIDIA's top executive for Latin America, Marcio Aguiar, has denied that the region is being used as a route to smuggle restricted chips into China. His comments follow allegations by AI firm Anthropic that Chinese laboratories have utilized smuggled processors to achieve recent advancements in artificial intelligence.
Aguiar acknowledged that export control pressures are significant, noting that NVIDIA scrutinizes large chip orders, especially from unfamiliar countries, and refuses sales if adequate documentation for data centers is not provided. These statements address concerns raised in a mid-May paper by Anthropic, which urged the U.S. to maintain a one-to-two-year lead over China in AI development, citing chip smuggling and remote data center rentals as methods used by Chinese labs.
In a separate development, Huawei is considering deploying its latest Ascend artificial intelligence chips within its cloud and AI services in Latin America. Mark Chen, president of Huawei Cloud Latin America, confirmed this possibility in an interview, though he described the Ascend 950 chip generation as being in the early stages of deployment. Chinese AI firms, including Alibaba and ByteDance, are already using the Ascend 950 chips, and DeepSeek is running its models on the hardware.