Chip smuggling operation that sent 53,000 banned American chips to China gets busted — $12 million worth of chips funneled through South Korean company

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/chip-smuggling-operation-that-sent-53000-banned-american-chips-to-china-gets-busted-dollar12-million-worth-of-chips-funneled-through-south-korean-company

Chip smuggling operation that sent 53,000 banned American chips to China gets busted — $12 million worth of chips funneled through South Korean company::A smuggling operation carried out by the unnamed South Korean 'Company A' involved 53,000 chips worth nearly $12 million.

208 points · 7 comments · view on lemmy.world

7 Comments

robocall@lemmy.world · 14 pts · 2y

Come on, south Korean company, you used to be cool!

Denvil@lemmy.one · 12 pts · 2y

100% thought this meant potato chips and was wondering if they meant bags or individual chips. Surely they didn't count every potato chip??

akrot@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 2y (4 replies)

Doing the maths, that's ~200$/chip. Even Nvidia 4060 is more expensive.

Tangent5280@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 2y (3 replies)

Maybe its just the chip, not the entire board.

ClumsyTomato@lemmy.sdf.org · 7 pts · 2y (2 replies)

The article states "this operation involved chips made to convert analog signals to digital". So not GPUs, or even CPUs, but specialized ADC (Analog-to-digital converter) chips.

Tangent5280@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 2y (1 reply)

I thought those were built into the chip wafers nowadays. They still have seperate on-board chips for ADC?

SkybreakerEngineer@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 2y

Depends on the chip. A purpose built SOC may have them built in, but there's always more generic applications for a standalone ADC