NVIDIA

An obscure Indian pharmaceutical company is an unexpected player in delivering powerful NVIDIA artificial intelligence (AI) chips to Russia despite Western sanctions restricting the export of sensitive technologies to Russia that could be used by its military.

Shreya Life Sciences exported 1,111 Dell PowerEdge XE9680 servers with NVIDIA’s powerful H100 AI chips, valued at $300 million, to Russia from April to August this year, according to a Bloomberg report.

How they got there was all legal because India is not part of U.S. and European Union sanctions. Indeed, Shreya Life Sciences, founded in 1995 in Moscow, initially distributed pharmaceutical products to Russia. Between January 2022 and August 2024, Shreya sold about $22 million in pharmaceuticals to Russia, Bloomberg reported, based on trade-tracking data.

By September 2022, Shreya began exporting restricted machines to Russia in what has turned out to be sort of a nightmarish Whac-A-Mole game for U.S. tech leaders. Shreya’s first shipment of electronics included computer hardware worth more than $750,000 to Lanprint Ltd., a Russian trading company that was sanctioned by the U.S. in September 2023. After Lanprint and another Shreya client, Silkway LLC, were sanctioned, Shreya shifted its Russian exports to Main Chain Ltd. and I.S LLC, neither of which are currently on the U.S. sanctions list.

The funneling of advanced technology to Russia not only underscores holes in efforts by Western governments to block access to sensitive technology but the emergence of India as an intermediary for the export of prohibited goods. As a consequence, NVIDIA, Dell Inc. and AMD Inc. face heightened scrutiny for their role in India’s re-export supply chain.

In February 2022, Dell stopped selling products directly in Russia after the invasion of Ukraine. But the PC maker is responsible for ensuring third-party resellers follow international export laws.

“Our trade compliance program is strict,” Dell told Bloomberg. The company said it monitors sales carefully to prevent misuse — something echoed by NVIDIA and AMD representatives.

The quandary for tech again points to supply-chain issues in an increasingly complex global economy predicated on so many intertwined, interconnected points.

The most striking example occurred in September, when supply-chain interference by Israeli agents led to the attack on militant and political group Hezbollah via exploding pagers and walkie-talkies. The attack, which killed 37, marked the latest (and most sophisticated) by spies and espionages. Israeli operatives created the supply chain as a web of shell companies to make and distribute counterfeit models, including shipping the explosive models to Hezbollah, according to The New York Times.

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