Smugglers are reportedly soldering top-tier HBM onto deliberately useless processors to sneak it into China, and the trick isn't new
THE SO WHAT
When $4,000 HBM stacks get glued to junk silicon just to cross a border, you’re looking at a supply chain where memory is now as geopolitically constrained as GPUs. If your roadmap assumes frictionless access to high-end HBM, you need a parallel plan for delays, gray-market leakage, and price spikes.
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