GoKawiilSmugglers use low-end chips to sneak Samsung and SK hynix HBM into China
A chip design firm reportedly builds deliberately weak server processors that fall below U.S. and South Korean export-control thresholds, then pairs them with high-end HBM memory from Samsung and SK hynix that is otherwise banned for export to China. The bundled chips are shipped to Hong Kong and carried across the border into Shenzhen, where workshops desolder the boards to extract the valuable HBM and discard the rest, according to The Information.