在里约网络峰会上，英伟达拉丁美洲业务最高主管 Marcio Aguiar 否认该地区曾充当向中国走私受限芯片的通道。他承认，通过严格的尽职调查，来自陌生国家的可疑批量订单会被筛除，包括询问预期用途和数据中心位置。这一否认是对 Anthropic 在 5 月中旬发布的一篇论文的回应，该论文敦促华盛顿保持对中国的 1-2 年 AI 领先优势，并声称中国实验室通过走私受限美国芯片、远程租用海外数据中心以及克隆美国模型输出，得以保持在技术前沿。文章将此置于更广泛的美中 AI 竞争背景下，并指出近期特朗普与习近平的峰会在技术问题上未能取得具体成果。
Nvidia denies Latin America role in chip smuggling as US-China AI rivalry reaches Brazil
Suspicious bulk orders from unfamiliar countries are screened out, Nvidia’s regional chief says, as Chinese capital courts Brazil
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Nvidia’s top executive for Latin America denied on Wednesday that the region has served as a corridor for restricted chips into China, weeks after Anthropic, the American maker of the Claude AI models, alleged that Chinese labs had relied partly on smuggled processors to drive recent advances.
“Companies appear, for example, in countries with which we have never had commercial relations, and they want to buy large quantities,” Aguiar said.
“So we ask, what are you going to buy this for? Where is the data centre? I need the documentation.” When the answers fall short, he said, the company walks away. “For several reasons, we do not sell.”
The document urged Washington to lock in a lead of one to two years over China in artificial intelligence, arguing that Chinese labs have stayed near the frontier only by smuggling restricted American chips, renting them remotely in offshore data centres beyond the reach of US export law, and harvesting the output of American models to clone their capabilities.
It sketched two futures for 2028, one in which “democracies write the rules of the technology” and another in which Chinese firms spread cheap, capable AI across the developing world on the back of state subsidies and “good enough” hardware.
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