Huawei pushes AI chip customers to black market for memory
huawei tells customers to find their own ai chip memory, leading to a black market with smuggled hbm units selling for $4000 each.
huawei is telling customers to source memory for its ai chips themselves, effectively pushing buyers onto the black market. the company plans to launch the ascend 960dt early next year, which it says will double the performance of its current chips. however, huawei's chinese suppliers can't produce enough high-bandwidth memory (hbm), and us export rules block direct purchases from samsung and sk hynix, which control over 80 percent of the global market. smugglers have found a workaround by bundling hbm with cheap server processors and shipping them to china through hong kong, where they are separated and sold.