Have the Chinese Hacked Nvidia?

If this report from the Center for Security and Emerging Technology, based on a report from the Verge, is true, the Chinese may have taken advantage of the West’s distraction with Ukraine to stage an attack on Nvidia, one of the most sophisticated chip designers in the United States. The company, run by Taiwanese based in California, already sells a great deal of its chip designs in China. (Others actually make the chips.) So the Chinese know that it is a ripe target. Chip design is a major strategic goal for Beijing because it buys $300 billion worth of semiconductors from foreign providers each year. Easing that dependence would be critically important for Xi Jinping. Here’s the story. Scroll down if necessary:

policy․ai Major Nvidia Hack Could Help China: Last week, Nvidia confirmed that hackers stole proprietary information and employee credentials in a late February cyberattack. A ransomware gang called “Lapsus$” claimed responsibility for the attack and said it had gained access to passwords, schematics, drivers, firmware and more. The group leaked some of the stolen data and threatened to release the rest unless Nvidia accedes to its demands, which include removing cryptocurrency mining limiters on its gaming cards and making its GPU drivers open source. There is no evidence that Lapsus$ is state-affiliated or that the attack was related to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but the hack could still pose a major problem for the Santa Clara-based firm. Nvidia is a “fabless” chip company (it doesn’t manufacture its own chips), meaning its value comes from its chip designs and the proprietary tools it uses to create them. As semiconductor analyst Dylan Patel pointed out, these tools — which the hackers appear to have gained access to — could help Chinese AI and GPU firms catch up to their U.S. competitors and design state-of-the-art chips of their own.

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