China AI Companies Dodge US Chip Curbs by Flying Suitcases of Hard Drives Abroad

17 walterbell 3 6/13/2025, 9:15:50 PM wsj.com ↗

Comments (3)

jsharkey · 1d ago
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." — Andrew S. Tanenbaum

In this case, 80TB / 6h20m flight is roughly 28Gbps

mitchbob · 1d ago
mindslight · 1d ago
This is a good illustration of the ineffectiveness of bluster-and-back-down foreign policy. Effective policy would be starting with smaller straightforward prohibitions, then adding more where China routes around etc. Whereas Trump starts with a blanket ban that sounds strong, and then makes unprincipled exceptions at the McDonalds-al-Lago bribe-thru.

The US has basically spent decades promulgating global business rules where investment capital routes around sovereign restrictions. Now China has plenty of capital to route around US regulations, the way only western corporations could in the past. So of course export regulations on technology are some of the first to be routed around. Just like I'm sure longer term the tariff taxes on China are going to have achieving a lot of Chinese industrial investment in other countries.