Can't Alibaba use a Singapore based cloud provider? For Nvidia as long as GPUs don't move to China or maybe directly owned by Chinese company it is clear. For SG based non US data center there aren't any sanctions.
About 15% or $2.7 billion of Nvidia's revenue for the quarter ended October came from Singapore, a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing showed. Revenue coming from Singapore in the third quarter jumped 404.1% from the $562 million in revenue recorded in the same period a year ago.
Because training usually requires bigger batches, doing a backward pass instead of just the forward pass, storing optimizer states in memory etc. This means it takes a lot more RAM than inference, so much more that you can't run it on a single GPU.
If you're training on more than one GPU, the speed at which you can exchange data between them suddenly becomes your bottleneck. To alleviate that problem, you need extremely fast, direct GPU-to-GPU "interconnect", something like NV Link for example, and consumer GPUs don't provide that.
Even if you could train on a single GPU, you probably wouldn't want to, because of the sheer amount of time that would take.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-reportedly-creating...
Those cards ship with 24GB of VRAM but supposedly there's companies doing PCB rework to upgrade them to 48GB:
https://videocardz.com/newz/nvidia-geforce-rtx-4090d-with-48...
Assuming the regular SKUs aren't making it into China anyway through back channels...