The US government recently imposed export rules preventing chipmakers like NVIDIA from shipping chips to China (including the GeForce RTX 4090), citing AI safety concerns. However, the US government highlighted that the move wasn’t designed to run down China’s economy, further indicating that it was a safety measure to prevent using the chips in military advances.
While it’s evident that the rules have heavily impacted China, this hasn’t hindered or deterred advances in other areas, particularly when it comes to AI workloads. A user from Tieba Baidu forums recently visited a Chinese factory specializing in recycling graphic cards. The user witnessed the workers at the plant tear the RTX 4090, allowing them to extract the AD102 silicon and GDDR6X memory modules.
According to a spot by our sister site, Tom’s Hardware, the workers could repurpose these components onto a “special reference” PCB with a blower-style cooler. Tom’s Hardware states that the entire process is similar to “organ traffic” since the factory only preserves the GPU and GDDR6X chips during disassembling, dumping the rest of the components to second-hand markets.