The illicit flow of technology to Russia goes through this Hong Kong address, 25 July 2024

From a nondescript seventh-floor office at 135 Bonham Strand near Hong Kong’s financial district, at least four companies are operating with a shadowy mission: facilitating the illicit trade of Western technology to Russia...

The companies have names like Olax Finance and Rikkon Holding. Their office...appears

unoccupied. No one answered during a visit last month...

Yet the companies are a crucial link in a chain connecting U.S. research laboratories to Chinese factories, Russian arms makers and the battlefields of Ukraine — and a sign that the U.S. government and tech giants cannot control where their technology goes.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, nearly $4 billion of restricted chips have poured into Russia from more than 6,000 companies, including those at Hong Kong’s 135 Bonham Strand, according to a Times analysis of Russian customs data, corporate records, domain registrations and sanctions data. The analysis examined nearly 800,000 shipments of restricted electronic goods into Russia since mid-2021.

Even as the West sought to cut off access to semiconductors through trade restrictions, Russia established such a robust parallel supply chain that it imported almost the same number of critical chips in the last three months of 2023 that it did in the same period in 2021, according to the analysis of Russian customs data...

Russia’s technology imports begin with U.S. chipmakers selling their products to international distributors. The chip companies are not legally required to track where their goods go from there. Russia has then turned to the international distributors — which are in Hong Kong, China, Turkey, India, Serbia and Singapore, according to The Times’s analysis — to maintain a steady supply of tech...

One important chip in the Russian missiles was the Field Programmable Gate Array, or F.P.G.A., made by U.S. companies such as Advanced Micro Devices and Intel. The chip is used in fire alarms, internet modems, missiles and drones to process data at lightning speed and is banned for sale to Russia.

Since the war began, Russia has imported more than $390 million in F.P.G.A.s, according to Russian customs data. The shipments are just one sliver of the Kremlin’s efforts to sidestep sanctions and maintain supplies of critical technology...

In emailed responses, AMD, Texas Instruments, Micron and Intel said they opposed the use of their technology by Russia and that they complied with U.S. export controls...