We reported earlier this week that Iran had announced that it had built a quasi-supercomputer using 213 AMD chips despite U.S. sanctions which would forbid the export of those chips to Iran. Where do you think the chips came from?

Wait, wait, don’t tell me. Let’s first look at a detail of a picture from the Iranian High Performance Computing Research Center (“IHPCRC”) website, showing the computer being built. (This picture has been mysteriously “disappeared” from the IHPCRC site, but was copied first by Softpedia before it vanished).

Let’s zoom in now on one of those boxes behind him.

Well, well, well. That box comes from Thacker FZE, whose website has also mysteriously disappeared, but still appears in the Google cache. Thacker is a distributor of AMD chips. In the UAE. Oh, and look, that would be UAE written right under Thacker’s name.

Who would have thought that the AMD chips came from the UAE?

According to an article in Computerworld:

A spokesman for Thacker … said they have no customers in Iran and noted that products can be imported into that country by many different means, including individual Iranians buying “one or two pieces” of technology in locations such as the UAE and then bringing them across the border.

I’ve been wondering where Baghdad Bob went. Apparently he’s now a spokesman for Thacker in the U.A.E.

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