Consider finding a Huawei Shell Company
A proposal for the enterprising investigative journalist.
Malaysia makes up ~10% of Nvidia's GPU revenue. Singapore makes up over a quarter. The AI chips are being smuggled to China in briefcases and fake baby bumps and live lobsters. Or being rented from clusters in the US through a shell entity — are you sure that's a Canadian businessman in IT solutions in need of those H100s?
I think you should consider trying to find a Huawei shell company, or the entire network. After all, the Bureau of Industry and Security only has ~5 employees that focus on enforcing the chip export controls.
As Miles Brundage notes, there are many a Pulitzer to be picked up in AI investigative journalism, if someone were to just connect the dots. And I think exposing a new network of Huawei chip shell companies or smugglers might put you in contention — and, helpfully, on the good side of the government.
After spending an hour last Thursday trying, I've got some leads (primarily looking at the Malaysian business associated with this Singaporean case), but I was ultimately not successful. I did learn a few things, though, and I've got a proposal for an enterprising investigative journalist or aspiring BIS employee to try their hand.
Quick takeaways:
Follow the people. The approach is similar to the FBI as depicted in the movies. The social graph matters, and so you're looking for leads, and the best place to start are the smugglers who have already been caught, and see which companies they've sat on the board of, or their spouses own.
Check government databases. The relationships very much are not so publicly documented online — the few people who run these companies have little online presence, though their names do turn up in government databases, some of which are publicly available (such as the board of directors in Singaporean companies). The other useful resource that I discovered was importyeti, which provides easy access to corporate import/export records (and, on a small scale, for free)
Be proactive. [caveat: I'm not sure about the legality of this] A friend recommended that a good place to start would be to post on hostloc (a Chinese-language forum for compute rental) claiming that you're looking to rent out a large number of H100s, and see who bites. It does help if you can speak Chinese, though not essential.
Gemini Deep Research is the best AI agent for this kind of work. If you fully describe exactly what you're searching for, Gemini's Deep Research tool outperforms OpenAI's, both in terms of the depth of its search, and the creativity of its ideas (though it is much slower). Probably just run multiple at the same time though. I would recommend keeping a record of the thought traces.
This will probably take ~40 hours. If you're optimizing for speed. I think, conditional on being able to find ~10 leads, and then taking ~1 hour to determine whether there is anything there, and 4 hours to follow it properly.
Use whatever contacts you have. Finding leads is made much easier if you have tech contacts who work at large clusters/aggregators like SFCompute or Voltage Park, where you can ask them for clients. Though my guess is that, for legal liability reasons, these companies, unless mandated, do the bare minimum of know-your-customer that they can get away with. I'd consider reaching out to the authors of these articles.
If you're interested in taking on this project seriously, or you've got any leads, please reach out — I'm @jasonhausenloy.48 on Signal.
I'd love to chat, send you my notes or connect you with some folks. And if you need funding (for your time, to buy Singapore government reports, or semianalysis subscriptions), and see this post <3 days after it was published, I'd recommend applying for the Tarbell Grants. Deadline is May 31st!