(Image credit: Nvidia) Chinese companies are paying as much as 600,000 Chinese Yuan ($82,000) for servers built around Nvidia's five-year-old A100 accelerator and modifying gaming GPUs to run AI workloads, as a U.S. smuggling crackdown and a Chinese customs freeze on legally approved chips choke off every other supply route at once, according to the Financial Times . The price of an A100 server has roughly tripled since late last year, while Nvidia's flagship DGX B300 system has doubled to more than 8 million ($1.1 million) on the black market over the past six months. Servers built on the A100, a data-center GPU Nvidia launched in 2020, have climbed from about 200,000 Chinese Yuan ($22,300) to as much as 600,000 ($67,000) since late last year, the FT reported, citing chip traders. Demand has also pulled in gaming processors that can be modified to run inference.…