from Hacker News

Chinese AI firms smuggling suitcases full of hard drives to dodge US chip curbs

by lnyan on 6/14/25, 4:21 PM with 3 comments

• by 0cf8612b2e1e on 6/14/25, 5:37 PM

    This was a meticulously planned operation and took several months of preparation. Sources say that the engineers chose to fly in the data on hard drives, because it would take a lot of time to transfer the data online without attracting attention. They then divvied up the hard drives between four passengers to avoid raising alarm bells with Malaysian customs and immigration officers.
  

  Months? I must be missing some complexity because suitcases of hard drives does not seem like it required any clandestine operations. Would have been logistically more annoying, but possibly less suspicious to mail the drives piecemeal to different addresses.

• by metalman on 6/14/25, 11:19 PM

  lots of sci-fi had "data runners" operative word is "had", because it was an edgy smuggling thing, but now here we are specing the whole thing out and given the technology to get data links from any moving vehicle on earth to space and back down to any other moving vehicle somewhere else on earth, this is a temporary measure untill China gets it's LEO sattelite swarm up to full density, like space x has now. not that tape/hard drive smuggling will go away, bit it will be just for ambitious second rung operations