Russia skirts sanctions, acquires Nvidia and AMD chips through Dell servers from India

In brief: Russia has been circumventing sanctions imposed connected it by sneaking tech into nan federation since nan warfare pinch Ukraine began. According to a caller report, 1 of nan methods it is utilizing to get high-end processors is to acquisition Dell servers from an Indian pharmaceutical company.

The US and nan European Union restrict nan export of dual-use equipment to Russia that could beryllium utilized successful its subject business complex, a ruling put successful spot pursuing Russia's penetration of Ukraine successful 2022.

Bloomberg News reports that betwixt April and August 2024, Shreya Life Sciences, a mid-sized Indian pharmaceutical company, exported 1,111 units of Dell's PowerEdge XE9680 servers, which person an mean value of $260,000, to Russia.

The servers were equipped pinch 4th-gen Xeon Scalable CPUs and Nvidia H100 aliases AMD Instinct MI300X accelerators optimized for AI operations. Data disposable for 998 of nan shipped servers show they were equipped pinch nan H100 chips.

The servers, worthy an estimated $300 million, were legally exported nether India's waste and acquisition regulations. They were sent to 2 Russian trading companies, Main Chain Ltd. and I.S. LLC. Bloomberg writes that these were conscionable nan latest successful a bid of exertion exports Shreya made to Russia since September 2022.

While nan servers shipped to Russia from India, they originated successful Malaysia. Between March and August 2024, 1,407 PowerEdge XE9680 units were shipped from Malaysia to India. Neither Malaysia's Investment, Trade and Industry Ministry nor nan Prime Minister's Office responded to an email from Bloomberg seeking comments.

India does not participate successful nan US and EU sanctions imposed connected Russia, which it relies connected for subject instrumentality and accrued lipid imports.

Shreya was founded successful Moscow successful 1995 by Sujit Kumar Singh. It started by distributing and trading pharmaceutical narcotics earlier creating its ain manufacturing plants. Between January 2022 and August 2024, it sold $22 cardinal worthy of pharmaceutical products to Russia. The first grounds of non-medical exports was successful September 2022, erstwhile it shipped machine hardware to Russian patient Lanprint Ltd worthy $755,333. Lanprint was later added to nan US sanctioned institution list.

India is nan second-biggest supplier of restricted tech to Russia aft China. It was reported successful 2022 that Russia was buying chips from nan Chinese grey market. A risky move, considering 40% of them were recovered to beryllium defective.

China is besides taxable to US sanctions connected definite tech. In April, it was reported that Chinese entities, including investigation institutes and universities, were capable to obtain high-end Nvidia AI products by purchasing server products, specified arsenic those from Dell, embedded pinch nan chips from resellers.