Chinese companies are resorting to chips repurposed from standard PC gaming products to develop artificial intelligence tools, after Washington blocked US exports of high-performance processors.Thousands of Nvidia gaming graphics cards are being stripped of their core components in factories and workshops every month, before being installed on new circuit boards, according to two factory managers and two chip buyers familiar with the situation.

Industry experts said the repurposing of chips from cards designed to be slotted into consumer PC motherboards to improve gaming graphics amounted to a rough workaround to tackle the lack of high-end processors in China.

While Nvidia’s gamer-focused products have raw computing power, they are not as capable in the high-precision calculations needed for training some large language models with bigger data sets. Due to the limits of interconnection speeds between chips, it is also challenging to overcome this by simply grouping more chips in computing clusters.