After lambasting Nvidia's efforts to circumvent US export restrictions against China as "un-American," the CEO of chips-for-AI outfit Cerebras, Andrew Feldman, is back in the spotlight amid revelations one of its largest customers, G42, may be aiding the Middle Kingdom.
A Monday New York Times report claims that US intelligence agencies fear United Arab Emirates-based Group 42 may be supplying China with advanced technologies and genetic data describing millions of people.
G42 is an AI firm run by Peng Xiao — the former head of Emirati cybersecurity outfit DarkMatter which was blocked by Mozilla after employing US cyber spies for hack-for-hire work. The biz is involved in a number of fields, including biomedical matters, transportation, energy research, and cloud computing.
To power its AI research and development, G42 tapped Sunnyvale, California-based Cerebras Systems to develop a $100 million supercomputer cluster named “Condor Galaxy”. The company plans to build a total of nine facilities for G42 at a combined cost of $900 million.
Condor Galaxy systems are powered by Cerebra's wafer-scale WSE-2 chips, devices the size of a dinner plate claimed to offer impressive performance in AI training applications. Cerebras recently broke ground on the site of a second Condor Galaxy machine.
According to the NYT investigation, US officials and intelligence agencies, including the folks at the Central Intelligence Agency, believe G42 intentionally hides its involvement with Beijing. The intelligence agencies have also issued warnings about the organization’s work with large Chinese companies like Huawei.
Among the intelligence community’s concerns is that G42 could be a proxy for Chinese interests that cannot legally obtain US-derived AI compute resources and other sensitive tech due to export restrictions announced by the Commerce Department in October.
US export restrictions effectively barred the sale of most high-end GPUs and AI accelerators to Chinese buyers or users and required licenses to sell lower-end and consumer cards like the Nvidia RTX 4090 and L4.
In response to those rules, Nvidia reportedly plans to launch three GPUs with performance below the threshold at which export bans apply.
Creating such products is legal, but Cerebras boss Feldman recently took issue with the practice in an interview with The Register.
Feldman labeled Nvidia "un-American" and "embarrassing", before likening the company to an AI arms dealer.
"I think Nvidia armed China single handedly," he said. "If you think about Chinese AI capabilities … Nvidia gave them extraordinary amounts of Nvidia GPUs. There's no other way to look at it. It was legal, but that doesn't mean it doesn't carry a moral responsibility."
In the interview, Feldman also highlighted his decision not to do business in China. Which makes G42’s alleged China connection awkward. As does G42’s use of Nvidia GPUs in its systems, including the Artemis system which delivered 7.2 petaflops of double-precision performance in the LINPACK benchmark.
In a statement provided to The Register, Cerebras emphasized its Condor Galaxy supercomputing clusters are based are based in the US and offered to G42 through Cerebras Cloud.
"Within the Cerebras Cloud, we actively operate, manage, and execute all work done on Condor Galaxy. Condor Galaxy is located at Colovore, a high-performance colocation facility in Santa Clara, and is operated under U.S. laws, ensuring state of the art AI systems are not used by adversary states."
We're told that Feldman wasn't aware of the concerns raised in the New York Times report prior to its publication this week. Asked how the company's relationship with G42 might be impacted if these allegations were confirmed, a spokesperson offered the following statement: "Cerebras will always act in the best interest of the US. Cerebras does not comment on speculation."
While the initial Condor Galaxy systems have been deployed in the US, it's not clear if future systems might be deployed abroad.
The Biden administration has taken aggressive steps to prevent the export and sale of advanced AI accelerators and chipmaking equipment to China. However, these restrictions don't do anything to prevent Chinese individuals or orgs from renting cloudy accelerators, which are freely available from many sources around the world.
Preventing the use of hosted AI infrastructure is a challenge the administration continues to consider.
The US Bureau of Industry and Security has sought comment from infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) providers on the feasibility of additional regulations restricting access to some of their services. The Bureau wants to know how IaaS operators would identify customers developing or producing AI models of concern, and what actions could be taken to address them.
Biden also proposed regulation that would require US IaaS providers to report transactions from foreign persons which involve training of large AI models in his AI safety executive order. ®
Source: The register