The loophole that moved hundreds of thousands of chipsUS export restrictions prevent Nvidia from shipping its most powerful processors directly to China. But those same rules, until recently, didn’t stop Nvidia chips from ending up in data centers in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, or elsewhere, where Chinese companies could then lease access to them remotely. Preventing Chinese companies from renting cloud computing time on servers that already contain Nvidia hardware is a fundamentally different challenge. Regulating that kind of access would require either restricting who can purchase cloud computing services or mandating that cloud providers implement customer screening protocols tied to end-user nationality. Companies that facilitate international chip distribution or cloud computing services may need to invest heavily in compliance infrastructure, adding costs that eventually get passed along.