THE NVIDIA AI GPU BLACK MARKET | Investigating Smuggling, Corruption, & Governments

It’s a really good watch. I’ve put it on while playing some Factorio, so time went by quite quickly

yeah even I'm not that autistic and I watch videos of people soldering

I don't think LTT ever did or claimed to do investigative journalism (or really journalism at all)?

They make entertainment videos that sometimes have mildly informative value.

LTT doesnt make deep investigative hours-long videos anyway

Oh I almost forgot about him, I blocked his channels years ago. He is an idiot and a shill, and did illegal hidden advertising.
Why anyone would still watch his channels is very strange IMO.

Papa's here

Good ol' orange market.

You could also buy the Apple Studio with its large amount of unified ram for a similar price of a 5090. Of course it’s not as fast but it could run a model that needs more ram.

I live in Taiwan and the GPU is more expensive than America.

The issue is that nVidia are increasingly marketing their consumer grade GPUs to "prosumer" users. Whether that is small research groups working with "AI" or people farming the latest memecoin or... the other things you would need REALLY REALLY high bandwidth linear algebra from and let's move on.

Whereas AMD are actually still targeting that consumer market. I think it was the nvidia 40x generation where their consumer cards had like no memory at all and AMD were pumping out 16 GB on their cheap(-ish) models? My brain can only remember card generations while I am actively shopping and... yeah.

And yeah. I would LOVE an AMD card with 32 or even 64 GB of even slower memory. But games are still going to target nvidia because people keep buying it and that means that you just won't have much use beyond the 8 (or apparently now 16) GB that nVidia are going to let you buy. At which point... why waste money?

As for the prosumer and enterprise space? nVidia... have a long history of being assholes and previous GN videos have talked about the behind the scenes pressure they allegedly apply to system integrators and the like. And I will leave that there for Reasons.

But yes, many mid-tier and even high-tier companies could benefit from just buying AMD cards and there is very much a market for "high end" AMD cards... it is just that they have so few customers to make it worthwhile.

It's not explicable why AMD is not breaking rank on VRAM and vGPU, same reason as failing Intel.
But the reason is not mentionnable in polite company and it relates to why AMD exists at all.
By all accounts, AMD should have gone under decades ago, instead they're one of the only x86 platform licensee and they got that basically because of a fluke in history.

But here's the real deal, because of the regulatory environment, monopolies are technically illegal. Of course since 1980s enforcement of that has been a total joke as proven with the failure of the Microsoft anti-trust case. Anti-trust is currently neutered and even back then it wasn't really "anti-trust", merely anti-monopoly. That is the playbook for Intel and Nvidia that allows AMD to continue existing. They exist so that the other two aren't monopolies. They are kept alive as long, some market segments will have some competition and other will simply not be touched by Intel and AMD, dynamically decided, kind of like splitting territory, so that AMD can always survive.

So that Intel and Nvidia don't became actually illegal monopolies. This is a very conservative playbook as since the 90s they could have very well become monopolies and the neolibs wouldn't have squeaked. They would have cheered !

That's why you're not getting that actually threatening to Nvidia amounts of VRAM and vGPU from AMD and why they're dropping support for their 2018 datacenter GPU if they get a little too much of a good deal on the used market.

The solution is simple, destroy nvidia, not a calculated and gentle trust bust, no, break the company so it stops existing as a coherent entity.

Nvidia is a bunch of software and PNGs on top of TSMC. Break Nvidia, break Intel, break microsoft, break cisco, broadcom, break everything in silicon valley and put it all in a blender. And if anything grows too big again, break it the duck up again.

We really need a spreadsheet to track all this shit.

In the video alot of people said that it is slowing them down

GPUs that are banned from export to China can be easily acquired in low numbers in the country due to individuals bringing in banned GPUs which get sold just like unbanned GPUs after passing through several people. Also possible that some banned cards are repaired QC failures from the Chinese factories that produce these cards (the cards are produced in China, but are supposed to be exported and banned from export back into China). The export restrictions present more of a barrier for building out large AI clusters with many, many GPUs.
Nvidia almost certainly knows about this but turns a blind eye because they want to sell more cards and China is a large market.
There are some repair shops in China that can not only repair the GPUs, but can also transfer the GPU die onto an aftermarket PCB and give it double the amount of VRAM to create a card that Nvidia doesn't even sell.
Individual banned GPUs are easier to get than the full systems that Nvidia also sells. AMD GPUs are much less popular, Intel GPUs are basically non-existent. The overall most popular card for smuggling into China seems to be the RTX 4090.

Thanks! +1

I've added the link to the post🙌

Good question and thanks for asking!

As far as I'm currently aware, due to YouTube constantly changing things, YT thumbnails often will not load unless directly linked to the video's thumbnail (at least here on the Fediverse).

Because of this, it allows me to link to alternative sources within the post such as Invidious (YT alt ad-free frontend), Peertube, Bandcamp, etc.