Indian firms secretly funneled AMD, Nvidia AI GPUs to Russia — sanctions reportedly skirted on hundreds of millions of dollars of hardware
Circumventing of Western sanctions against Russia.
Following sanctions from the United States and its allies over the war against Ukraine, Russia now has to smuggle advanced processors into the country. As discovered by Bloomberg, an Indian pharmaceutical company has been exporting Dell servers to Russia, circumventing sanctions imposed by the U.S. government.
Between April and August 2024, Shreya Life Sciences shipped 1,111 Dell PowerEdge XE9680 servers, valued at hundreds of millions of dollars, to Russia. These servers are based on Intel's 4th Generation Xeon Scalable CPUs and are equipped with AMD Instinct MI300X or Nvidia H100 processors for AI and HPC processors. The shipments, which were legally conducted under India's trade regulations, were sent to two Russian companies, Main Chain Ltd. and I.S LLC. Trade data shows that these exports began in September 2022, following the imposition of sanctions that cut off access to Western markets.
The servers trace back to Malaysia, where they were initially sourced by Dell's subsidiary in India before being exported to Russia. Shipping documents for over 800 PowerEdge XE9680 servers show Malaysia as the country of origin. Between March and August 2024, India imported 1,407 of these Dell servers from Malaysia. Despite multiple attempts to seek comments from Malaysian officials regarding the exports, neither Malaysia’s Investment, Trade and Industry Ministry nor the Prime Minister’s Office provided a response to Bloomberg.
Shreya’s exports of Dell servers to Russia surged in April 2024, with an average price of $260,000 per server. These servers are classified under HS code 847150, part of a list of dual-use goods restricted by the EU and U.S. to prevent their use in Russian military operations. Main Chain, the primary recipient of Shreya's exports, was registered in Russia in January 2023 and is headed by Anastasia Obukhova, who previously ran small tourism companies.