Huawei Asks Clients to Source Their Own Memory Amid HBM Shortage, Driving Up Black-Market Sourcing and Smuggling Premiums
Huawei tells customers to find their own AI chip memory, effectively outsourcing procurement to the black market
Unable to secure sufficient High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) for AI chips such as the Ascend 960DT planned for early next year, Huawei has asked some customers to procure their own memory, driving buyers to black-market channels. Restricted by U.S. export controls, smuggling rings bundle HBM with low-end server processors, ship them to Hong Kong, and dismantle them there. This has driven the price of smuggled HBM3E chips up to roughly $4,000 each, pushing memory costs for a single AI chip to as much as $32,000.
The report highlights the severe supply chain distortions and extreme price premiums faced by downstream buyers of high-end computing chips due to memory shortages amid export restrictions and limited domestic manufacturing capacity.
Source:The Decoder · the-decoder.com