I mean GN has covered the Nvidia black market in China enough that we pretty much know that they run on Nvidia hardware still.

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dryarzeg 2 hours ago | parent [-]

How is this related to the inference, may I ask? Except for some very hardware-specific optimizations of model architecture, there's nothing to prevent one to host these models on your own infrastructure. And that's what actually many OpenRouter providers, at least some of which are based in US, are doing. Because most of Chinese models mentioned here are open-weight (except for Qwen who has one proprietary "Max" model), and literally anyone can host them, not just someone from China. So it just doesn't really matter.

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fennecfoxy an hour ago | parent [-]

I mean sure, but in terms of cost per dollar/per watt of inference Nvidia's GPUs are pretty up there - unless China is pumping out domestic chips cheaply enough.

Also with Nvidia you get the efficiency of everything (including inference) built on/for Cuda, even efforts to catch AMD up are still ongoing afaik.

I wouldn't be surprised if things like DS were trained and now hosted on Nvidia hardware.

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re-thc an hour ago | parent [-]

> unless China is pumping out domestic chips cheaply enough

They are. Nvidia makes A LOT of profit. Hey, top stock for a reason.

> I wouldn't be surprised if things like DS were trained and now hosted on Nvidia hardware

DS is "old". I wouldn't study them. The new 1s have a mandate to at least run on local hardware. There are data center requirements.

I agree it could still be trained on Nvidia GPUs (black market etc), but not running.

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yorwba 41 minutes ago | parent [-]

> The new 1s have a mandate to at least run on local hardware.

They do? Source?

But if that's true, it would explain why Minimax, Z.ai and Moonshot are all organized as Singaporean holding companies, with claimed data center locations (according to OpenRouter) in the US or Singapore and only the devs in China. Can't be forced to use inferior local hardware if you're just a body shop for a "foreign" AI company. ;)

	▲	re-thc 13 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> with claimed data center locations (according to OpenRouter) in the US or Singapore and only the devs in China They just have a China only endpoint and likely a company under a different name. Nothing to do with AI. TikTok is similar (global vs China operations).