Russians find way to buy US chips despite sanctions – Bloomberg
Suppliers to the Russian military-industrial complex have found a way to circumvent the sanctions and order chips from the American company Texas Instruments even after the sanctions were imposed.
This was reported by Censor.NET with reference to Bloomberg.
How did the Russians manage to circumvent the sanctions?
According to the publication, some Russian distributors have integrated information from the Texas Instruments (TI) online store called TI store into their trading platforms.
Their Russian customers see information about semiconductor stocks and product prices, and then place orders that are fulfilled and delivered through companies outside Russia.
It is noted that the websites getchips.ru and altchips.ru, which are blocked in the US and Europe but available in Russia, were mainly used for orders. The selection of TI products there coincides with the information received by the company's customers from its branded online store.
According to Bloomberg's sources, this means that Russian distributors have gained access to the proprietary application programming interface, or API, the technical coordinates that allow software to communicate and exchange data with each other.
Scale of purchases
One large Russian distributor processed more than 4,000 orders for hundreds of thousands of TI products worth about $6 million between August 2023 and August 2024.
Of these, orders for nearly $4 million were for Russian military companies. Before reaching Russia, the goods passed through Hong Kong or other countries.
Among the thousands of orders Bloomberg found in internal Russian documents, 287 orders were labeled "canceled," indicating that some customers either changed their minds or the distributor was unable to fulfill these orders.
The publication also notes that the Russian distributor applied a 40% markup to TI's prices, which, according to Bloomberg's sources, was done to cover the entire delivery and payment process.
