Russia ignores US sanctions and is planning ten supercomputers with banned Nvidia chips

Russia is probably working on supercomputers with Nvidia chipsets. (Image: Thicha – adobe.stock.com)

The mood between the USA and Russia is very tense, so the North American government and its allies have long since imposed economic sanctions. So it is difficult for Russia to get hold of Western technologies.

But not when it comes to semiconductors and chips.

Circuits for weapons

The KSE Institute, a Ukrainian analysis center working with the Kiev University of Economics, says: Russia imported advanced circuits of Western origin worth $2.5 billion in 2022 alone.

Researchers recently analyzed 58 Russian weapons recovered by the Ukrainian army and concluded: The weapons contain more than 1,000 foreign components, including a large number of semiconductors.

Where does the country get the technology from? It is impossible to say for sure, but US analysts believe that Russia uses parallel import channels that lead to China, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates.

This information is important for understanding the situation surrounding the ten supercomputers.

By the way: You can read how Russian journalists report independent news about CS:GO in this article:

Russian supercomputers with H100 GPUs from Nvidia

As part of US sanctions, the US government has banned Nvidia from selling its A100 and H100 chips to Russia and China. They are among the manufacturer’s most powerful GPUs and are used in the development of AI.

Nevertheless, Russia wants to build ten supercomputers by 2030, each using 100,000 to 150,000 H100 GPUs from Nvidia.

Symbolic image of an Nvidia hardware. (Image: Nvidia)

Here too, the secondary market extends to non-Western countries. As Jeuxvideo states, small batches of the parts can be imported from India, Taiwan and Singapore. If Russia did not have access to these chips, the country would probably not pursue such a project.

How performant would these supercomputers be? According to Jeuxvideo, 450 TFLOPs are expected to be achieved with FP64 computing power, although we assume that these are PFLOPs. However, that would still not be the world’s top level.

According to NVIDIA, the AI ​​supercomputer Israel-1 will have a performance of eight exaflops.

In fact, not even the fastest supercomputer runs smoothly:

Russia is planning to have ten supercomputers by 2030, each with over 100,000 H100 GPUs from Nvidia. The country does not source them from the West, but rather from secondary markets in the East. Do you believe in this ambitious goal? Feel free to write your opinion and thoughts in the GameStar forum.