Data‑center backdoor for banned AI chips

Foreign actors can bypass direct export bans by purchasing or leasing advanced chips into offshore or third‑party data centers and then selling compute services back to restricted markets. Intelligence operations may pair business recruitment and investment networks with these infrastructure channels to both gather information and gain indirect access to restricted technology. — This reframes export‑control and sanctions policy debates: regulators must consider compute‑as‑service and cross‑border data‑center pipelines, not just point‑of‑sale hardware flows.