OT but one thing I didn't realize until reading this comment:
Those used CMP 170HX 8GB were advertised in front of crypto server rigs. Those were probably spread across South Asian scam malls(shopping mall buildings built in literal sovereignty contested areas of non-China/Japan/Korea/Russia non-India non-African non-Muslim Asia, under guises of Chinese tourist destinations, that are literally rented out to local Chinese-speaking gangs engaging in all sorts of gang crimes from tech support scams to human and organ trafficking, straight out of the fictitious Chiba in Neuromancer), and they would happily sell or rent compute to Chinese AI firms if only those were more valuable than 8GB VRAM they have, which they all had all along.
GPU export to China must have become significantly less meaningful since the 170HX unlock became a thing. That alone must have provided petaflops of unsanctioned untraced junks for parts priced compute to Chinese AI startups.