ZTE, a Chinese company, was blacklisted for years and paid something like a billion dollars for evading US sanctions.
It is really quite hard to not have connections to the US economy. If you really don't want to do business with us, you probably want to bank with banks that have connections with us. If you don't play ball with our legal system, we'll go after your assets at your bank, and if your bank doesn't want to play ball we'll sanction them and completely cut them off from any bank connected to us. There is no foreign bank that is "too big to fail" if they don't comply with our courts, and really there aren't any that are going to stand behind somebody else's fraud.
> It is really quite hard to not have connections to the US economy.
I'm not sure I understand. AI startups are everywhere. It seems it would be trivial to set up a Kazakhstan AI "startup", buy a bunch, then ship them to Russia/China. Or are you saying that any non-governmental entity that would be interested in these would also be interested in the US market? And, someone friendly to the US would eventually peek in their server room and rat them out?
You would need a lot of capital to do that, where's it coming from and do the people who have it really want to be sanctioned, lose privileges to fly basically anywhere, have bank accounts, or travel anywhere at all?
Like everybody involved has to be fine with being airgapped entirely from the western banking system and any allied country or risk quite a long time in prison.
Who's got tens or hundreds of million dollars and wants to risk it evading export controls for a percentage profit?
Perhaps you don't understand, your Kazakstan bank would freeze your funds for the Americans because they didn't want to lose the ability to transact with any bank attached to the US or any bank attached to any bank attached to the US. The financial reach of US courts is long and not many people with lots of resources want to be blacklisted from ever traveling, spending money, or doing any transactions with the west.
And do you think the CIA isn't watching some random ex-soviet satellite state startup with sketchy funding sources buying enough A100s to build a supercomputer and then producing nothing with them? It's their whole job to look for interesting things, and they find them more than is imagined. If you hear about it, they're doing a bad job.
Everybody's entire phone records and so much more are part of an NSA dragnet. Do you really think large transactions for high potency computer equipment is being ignored?
Gazprombank seems to be doing business fine with western companies and countries, and they have branches in the CIS. So your post seems factually incorrect.
An example:
https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/us-judge-rule...
ZTE, a Chinese company, was blacklisted for years and paid something like a billion dollars for evading US sanctions.
It is really quite hard to not have connections to the US economy. If you really don't want to do business with us, you probably want to bank with banks that have connections with us. If you don't play ball with our legal system, we'll go after your assets at your bank, and if your bank doesn't want to play ball we'll sanction them and completely cut them off from any bank connected to us. There is no foreign bank that is "too big to fail" if they don't comply with our courts, and really there aren't any that are going to stand behind somebody else's fraud.