That really sounds plausible. They could open a training farm in Vietnam or Mongolia (or even Taiwan, or really anywhere the internet goes) and just use it, the GPUs don’t need to be located in the mainland. The only way to lock down the GPUs would be to just restrict completely to who could use them, and then prevent them from contracting with sanctioned entities.
When I was working in Beijing, we definitely had resources we couldn’t access locally but could easily access remotely so it didn’t really matter.
Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea are closeby and large+stable enough to easily create such data centers. Small batches for experimentation by team can be easily smuggled. China is too large and powerful to be completely sanctioned.
When I was working in Beijing, we definitely had resources we couldn’t access locally but could easily access remotely so it didn’t really matter.