Doesn't Nvidia hold all the (literally/figuratively) chips here? If they told the US to screw off, wouldn't we see a huge migration of companies to Europe / other countries so they could purchase their GPUs?
Yeah it would be easy, just close down their headquarters in Santa Clara, find a new semiconductor fab - because TSMC sure as hell isn't siding against the US, in fact neither is Samsung or Intel, so lets say build their own fab business. Then all they have to do is find a new set of customers because none of the US big tech companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft etc. are going to join them...
Or you know, buy a senator or two and do whatever they feel like... Pretty sure some of the super ethical companies you listed would even chip in a few million. They are well on the way to eroding any kind of oversight as is. Just give them a bit more time.
No, if they mess up one generation for one reason or the other, others will catch up and might take over their position. Apple came from almost nothing and built a GPU in a few years. I think the government might like their way of locking things down too. (Not a fan myself).
If I were every other tech company I would be pooping my pants. So if the US gov plays this with Nvidia, what does stop them to do the same for the information in X, FB, YT, and any other trove of information? Unless (as we now know from the Twitterfiles) the US gov already has their hands on the information of all the aforementioned.
I'm not sure what to think about this. Leaving aside whether this trade war is a good idea, I think this is a really bad look from Nvidia. It's not a good look to be undermining US sanctions, at the end of the day the US has the power to basically entirely crush Nvidia's exports into China. Given that's the case it would have been a lot smarter to work with the US gov to figure out what was an acceptable level for the exports they do, rather than play these bullshit games and risk a punitive response. The US really isn't joking about these sanctions.
>to figure out what was an acceptable level for the exports they do
But that is exactly what they did. The acceptable level of exports is whatever the law says it is and Nvidia followed the law. "to get around US export restrictions" is just a sneaky way of saying "to comply with US export restrictions".
Yes, true, but the idiom "the law is an ass" doesn't exist for no reason.
Politics created the rules; drew the line beyond which is "bad". Nvidia stayed under the line so as to comply with the rules, and yet "politics" still doesn't like it.
That's not what happens. What happens is that the government comes out with something like "Hey, we don't want you to sell AI chips to China". Then with some beauracratic process - which almost certainly involves consulting with chip manufacturers - invents a set of rules get drawn. Then nVidia produce a SKU of their chip (note: not a new chip, a variant of one that clearly breaches the rules) that exactly matches the letter of regulation, but not the intent of the regulation.
Now, the reasonable thing to do as the regulator - is to acknowledge that the company you were asking for compliance from is acting in a hostile manner and modify the regulation to punitively clamp down on everything they're doing.
What I'm saying is that if I were the US in this situation I would be happily inviting nVidia to comply with the new rules that allows them to export anything above 100nm. Nvidia had their shot at meeting the regulation - the spirit not the letter, they blew it, they can live with the consequences.
The US set new rules and Nvidia redesign/make new product to make sure they are play within these new rules. In other words, this is a process of Nvidia following the rules, how is this a bad look from Nvidia at all?
If US really wants to ban all exports they should have done it at the beginning instead of playing this whac-a-mole game with entities at US, which turns out to be a very bad look from these bureaucrats that they don't know what they want and what they are doing.
Let's be honest though - Nvidia aren't really redesigning their products at all. These chip companies don't work by manufacturing new variants. They produce one chip that does it all and they either fuse out or write firmware to limit them. So what will happen with these chips is exactly the same thing that happened with the crypto-disabled products they sold. They'll just buy the limited chips and then find a workaround. That was pretty much fine when it was just market segmentation with crypto, quite a different thing when you're participating in skirting sanctions.
I see it as a case of Nvidia obeying the letter of the law but not the spirit - hence these cat and mouse games with the US government; where they expend extra effort to work around the rules just so they can make money from China.
"Don't sell to China" spells it out in a way that doesn't allow for such misinterpretations. It's not hard to fit the "spirit" into the description. It's likely fewer words than whatever they made a hash of in the first place.
Expecting a US tech company to not behave as per the uber-capitalism that defines almost everything else about how the country is run is just weirdly, unexpectedly naive.
The US government has been pretty clear why they are doing this and the purpose of the “chip war”.
Nvidia and other businesses have been handed an olive branch but allowing them to sell things the US government considers inconsequential to China to make a few bucks. If Nvidia decides to abuse this privilege, the olive branch might just get taken back.
I would disagree. Our form of classical liberalism requires those wielding the baton of power to do a better job. The state serves the individual.
Private enterprises anticipating the political needs of a central government was a tenet of Mussolini’s economic fascism and has no place in American political discourse.
Companies (theoretically) play by the rules. If those rules allow shenanigans, expect shenanigans. A government figure saying things like this is probably for the best, as it means they know not to waste time looking for loopholes… but even then, you can't expect companies to know what to take seriously in advance, given how much noise and fury signifying nothing normally comes out of talking heads.
Reminds me a bit of the UK banning all psychoactive substances when they got tired of playing whack-a-mole with what the press called "designer drugs", that hadn't technically been banned but which acted exactly the same as things which had been.
The US already threatened to invade the Netherlands a few years ago, it worked like a charm. There isn't much the Dutch can do, when the US wants something from them
That's not threatening to invade. That's granting the US President powers to take acts, invasion being one of them, without congressional oversight.
I'm a Canuck, but you need to call a thing what it is.
For example, sanctions could be something done as part of this bill. Arresting a Dutch person on US soil.
You may not like this bill, and I personally don't have much of an opinion on it, but it does not say "arrest and we will immediately invade and blow up cities and take control of your entire nation". It isn't even directed at the Netherlands directly, instead the court, wherever that may be now or in the future.
Saying "The threatened to invade" is an effort to put the worst possible spin on it. And without context, it makes it sound like this happened 2 weeks ago, such as "The US moved a carrier group to the coast of the Netherlands, and they're threatening to invade!"
The only way I would accept language like "threatened to invade" would be if it was actually threatened.
The Hague is in Netherlands and the US has threatened that it will invade if ever a US service member is brought to the international criminal court.[0]
The fact that it is located in The Hague doesn't make the ICC "the Netherlands" any more than a drug cartel based in Miami is "the United States".
It's not an entity of the Netherlands government in any respect.
As far as the actual country of Netherlands goes, the United States and that country have a standard extradition treaty, as the US does with most countries that have a reasonable court system that protects the rights of the accused.
The US views the ICC as an illegitimate kangaroo court that does not meet the minimum standards for such protection, and thus does not recognize it any more than it would recognize, say, a terrorist-run "Islamic court". If such "courts" grab US citizens and put them "on trial", then, yeah, they shouldn't be surprised when US Navy SEALs coming crashing through their windows. That wouldn't make it an "invasion" of the country where the "court" was located, but something more akin to a hostage rescue mission.
> The US views the ICC as an illegitimate kangaroo court that does not meet the minimum standards for such protection
No, it doesn't, which is why it makes referrals to the ICC. The US just believes that the US, uniquely, should not be subject to any external accountability, because it uniquely can be trusted to hold its own war criminals accountable without such external fallback.
In part: "We object, however, to the investigation or prosecution of our citizens by the ICC, whose jurisdiction we have not consented to and which lacks necessary safeguards to ensure against politically motivated investigations and prosecutions."
> The US already threatened to invade the Netherlands a few years ago, it worked like a charm.
It worked...at what, exactly? I mean, leaving aside whether what was in question was actually a threat, I don't see that it has had any substantive effect on the policy either of the Netherlands or of the particular international institution headquartered in The Hague that that was its subject, so I don't see how it can be described as working like a charm, except as a piece of US domestic propaganda (which was its real purpose, of course.)
This article seems extremely one-sided. The new products comply with the rules. Why are you changing the rules?
Grandstanding over power instead of just writing better rules doesn't seem like a great approach. Other people do all the difficult stuff, because if they stop they don't get paid. Getting paid (and lauded) for doing a bad job writing down some rules and complaining when they're followed is not great.
the "spirit" of the law is to restrict access to china to advanced type of chips
so if the law is permissive enough it allows easily getting around it, they can just rewrite the laws or go after nvidia directly for breaking the "spirit" of the law
The "intent of lawmakers" is based on what the law actually says, and when that is not clear because of ambiguous drafting (crucial point) then it is interpreted based on what the legislator must have meant in context.
Here if the law says "don't sell A to China" then you don't sell A to China but obviously you're free to sell B or C if you want to, you can't claim that the "spirit" and what was actually meant was not to sell anything at all...
Can't reply to mytailorisrich so I will write it here..
I am binge watching Last Week Tonight, and around s2e20(?) there is a Supreme Court ruling that interpreted something about medical care that if read literally (it has the word "state") would mean "each State individually" which would allow each state to slap it down, OR by the wider meaning of the word 'state' aka the central Government. So there are authorities in the US that very much interpret laws to capture the meaning.
That's a different type of ambiguity. That's ambiguity in the wording. The bureaucrat in question is saying they'll make the next thing illegal straight away, not that they need to go fix their poor wording.
The sole job of people who get other people's money to do a job can't define what they want, and are being praised for bypassing the written rules they're meant to write. I think this isn't really acceptable.
> The new products comply with the rules. Why are you changing the rules?
This should be obvious. They're changing the rules because the intention of the rule was being violated via a loophole that wasn't obvious when the rule was first made.
I'm not celebrating anyone. Although I do have an appreciation for policymakers who can adjust quickly, and I recognize that making rules that aren't exploitable is difficult given you're fighting an uphill battle against incentives and the opponent will therefore attempt to find any small and unpredictable loophole in order to maximize profits.
> Their incompetence is at best causing a lot of wasted effort.
It's unclear if you're saying the intention of the rule is bad, or merely the way the rule was implemented is bad. If you're talking about the former, you haven't justified that position. If you're talking about the latter, then you are fixating on an irrelevant detail that will be corrected and should step back and look at the bigger picture.
> If you're talking about the latter, then you are fixating on an irrelevant detail that will be corrected and should step back and look at the bigger picture.
I don't think triumphalistic declarations of war from legislators who have just written a badly worded law should be celebrated. If that's not big picture enough, either justify why that is, or please refrain from telling me what I should be talking about.
Tit for tat moves like this serves no legitimate public interest. The fact that Nvidia can even "redesign" and nerf chips on the fly should perhaps make it obvious to keen observers how ridiculous trying to control compute is. The bureaucrats have no idea what they're working with, a surface level grasp of technology and then naturally confabulate how impactful these trade wars are for political clout. If it were China doing this against the United States, what do you think would happen? Would we just bend over and deal with the slow tech? Or would we be pushed to work even faster? Obviously, all this is going to do is spur up domestic ASIC chip design and production. It's a net-win for China, with some short term pain.
If we draw a line and say "everything on this side of the line is permitted", of /course/ Nvidia are going to try to sell the most expensive things that can be sold from the permitted side of the line. They have a duty to, within the bounds of the law, maximise shareholder profits. That's how capitalism works - it's how we've built basically all of western society.
Everything on the permissible side of the line we draw will be done. This is the entire purpose of having a line separating options into permissible and forbidden. So we shouldn't cross our fingers and lie about where we want the line to be drawn; we should make sure we draw the line where we actually want it to be.
If we don't want Nvidia selling anything at all in China, we need to say so already, rather than just shouting at them for doing things we said they were allowed to do.
What's the ultimate goal that the US has in denying these chips? It's just strategically to slow down the military and other development of China, right?
Or are they hoping that China will give in to some political demand?
Preventing China for using these chips for AI. So they cannot be used for things like LLMs, or possibly in espionage such as generating fake images, video, and audio.
They only need to postpone China's military tech development until their demographic issues catch up with them. At that point China won't have the luxury of being expansionist and will need to settle down to take care of its aging population.
That's right. In the super long-run steady state, what matters is population size (along with wealth and industrial production). If the US can maintain the status quo of the US having a slightly bigger economy, and just buy time for the US population to grow via immigration while the Chinese population declines, then eventually the world will be back to the geopolitical reality of the 2000s with a unipolar world with the US on top. China will still have revisionist and irredentist intent but won't be capable of carrying it out, and the US policy of containment will be successful.
This is a tricky one where it’s a lose/lose for Nvidia.
They have a fiduciary responsibility to investors to drive more revenue (while being compliant with laws), US gov doesn’t like that Nvidia is driving sales while technically being compliant to the letter of the law.
They have far wider latitude with fiduciary responsibility, which is not a requirement. There are examples of such, and a primary would be a company taking an environmental stance. EG, leaving profit on the table for environmental reasons.
So rather than making China dependent on a U.S. supply chain, clearly the USG should block products and motivate China to spend billions to develop their own native chip design and manufacturing. Good thing they don't know how to make stuff.
Any bets on how long until Chinese chips are the cutting edge on the planet?
I think the father implied that "they don't play by the rules" = they will try to hack/steal secrets instead of completing their own race to the betterment of technology.
There was a hack on 23andme.. if I was China/Russia, and it would be me hacking 23andme then I would have a wealth of information about children out of wedlock (blackmail), sick people (bribing), etc.
>I think the father implied that "they don't play by the rules" = they will try to hack/steal secrets instead of completing their own race to the betterment of technology.
> I would have a wealth of information about children out of wedlock (blackmail)
And then there's a moment of cultural confusion as the younger generation of parents looks at the person attempting blackmail and says "Correct, we couldn't afford the wedding. Were you offering to pay for one?"
IMO, the really interesting thing are what becomes of the Taiwanese industry as the political situation (they have an election next year) develops. TSMC has applied for-and has received-an exemption from US prohibitions, as has Samsung up in South Korea. That speaks volumes.
>Any bets on how long until Chinese chips are the cutting edge on the planet?
Right now SMIC can produce 5 nm and 7 nm chips. That means about 5 years difference. I guess they can catch up in a decade if they invest enough resources, and will.
Having a domestic chip industry will be a huge win for China. Not only the chips will be much cheaper for them but they can export a ton while undercutting the competition. They will try to eat TSM, Samsung, Intel, AMD pies.
The West pretends that Taiwan is another country with another totally alien set of people who hate the mainland. However, that is not really the case. I imagine it's fairly easy to poach TSMC personnel, who well now realize that Taiwanese semi-conductor industry is going to be ruined by American meddling in the coming decade (much like they did of Japan's).
> I imagine it's fairly easy to poach TSMC personnel
They already did that. They offered some TSMC engineers much better payment and they built 5nm and 7nm fab processes for SMIC using DUV instead of EUV. :)
To add insult to the injury, Huawei released their Kirin 9000s CPU during US secretary of commerce visit in China.
I think TW banned semi workers from working in PRC for triple pay, after banning TW recruiters from helping PRC poach TW workers didn't work. Meanwhile, TW semi workers still underpaid and overworked.
One thing I'm not clear about is whether this could be made up for by just making more. If the US is not exporting to China, that probably means they have a surplus of components for the rest of the world. So it's quite possible prices will go down enough that it's worth it for China to just keep all chips they produce, for "national security".
Is having one really fast and big chip that much better than having 10x 5 year old chips? (I have no idea how many chips they can produce, just wondering if being second really is that bad.)
This is all on the US gov for creating regulations which they later realized were crappy.
The US gov created some rules which basically set some limit on the max bi-directional bandwidth of the chip, the max number of operations per second (4800 TOPS), and in the latest regulation they added another rule around “performance density”.
So basically they said something like: if you make a chip that has (in my arbitrary units) less than 100 TOPS, 500 bandwidth, and 200 performance density, then it’s OK to go to China.
So Nvidia made a chip that has 99 TOPS, 499 bandwidth, and 199 performance, which of course would be legal to export. And now the government is saying, well, we don’t like that. Which doesn’t make a lot of sense to me given they previously said they were OK with chips not hitting those limits being exported.
I don’t think you can blame Nvidia for taking the government at face value, assuming the government picked what they consider to be good values for their “chip banning equation” and then making chips that apply to the new rule.
This just seems to me like the US gov doesn’t know what they want exactly and thus keeps changing their regulation, none of which is a surprise to me. The whole thing reeks of incompetence.
> This just seems to me like the US gov doesn’t know what they want exactly
They know exactly what they want. Writing regulations to attain that without too many unintended consequences or negative impacts on the US is the difficult part.
Well, US sanctions against China led China to develop their domestic semiconductor industry. SMIC can now fab 7 and 5 nm chips. In a decade, they will probably be on par with TSM.
Banning AI chips exports will have the same effect.
Long term US will lose money from sales while China will use their newly developed industries to earn more.
This move is only to win some votes at the next elections.
AI novel domain, no one knows what spirit of the law actually means with respect to AI other than some vague intentions of limiting PRC access to compute that can do military AI stuff. Even then, what does that actually mean? LLM models to help PLA shuffle paperwork, or coordinate drone swarms? What level of compute enables what, and what happens when models shrink to work on less powerful hardware.
Regulators made educated guess to legislate it as XYZ fixed levels of compute that's fraction of current compute, which doesn't scale, reasoning it will increase compute gap over time. Nvidia obeys law, because I surmise even they don't know what threshold of compute translates to what potential military capabilities - it would be crazy if were so integrated into US MIC that they do.
Queue Raimondo fires warning shot at Nvidia for following law. The logic behind these moves is to make doing business with PRC expensive in the hopes uncertainty would compel AI sector to reduce business with PRC out of their own volition. Because when US gov doesn't actually know how to regulate compute controls, thereby can't effectively regulate with rule of law, they resort to rule by law (PRC playbook) to shape behaviour. A few flip flops might seem like regulatory incompetence, but enough sustained flip flops to create enviroment of uncertainty is strategy.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 163 ms ] threadNothing. I believe all governments in theory have the power to do that in one way or another. Governments write and enforce the laws of their country.
But that is exactly what they did. The acceptable level of exports is whatever the law says it is and Nvidia followed the law. "to get around US export restrictions" is just a sneaky way of saying "to comply with US export restrictions".
Politics created the rules; drew the line beyond which is "bad". Nvidia stayed under the line so as to comply with the rules, and yet "politics" still doesn't like it.
Now, the reasonable thing to do as the regulator - is to acknowledge that the company you were asking for compliance from is acting in a hostile manner and modify the regulation to punitively clamp down on everything they're doing.
What I'm saying is that if I were the US in this situation I would be happily inviting nVidia to comply with the new rules that allows them to export anything above 100nm. Nvidia had their shot at meeting the regulation - the spirit not the letter, they blew it, they can live with the consequences.
If they meant "Don't sell to China", but they said "don't sell capability X+1 to China", so they sell capability X to China, who's fault is that?
Expecting a US tech company to not behave as per the uber-capitalism that defines almost everything else about how the country is run is just weirdly, unexpectedly naive.
Nvidia and other businesses have been handed an olive branch but allowing them to sell things the US government considers inconsequential to China to make a few bucks. If Nvidia decides to abuse this privilege, the olive branch might just get taken back.
Private enterprises anticipating the political needs of a central government was a tenet of Mussolini’s economic fascism and has no place in American political discourse.
Reminds me a bit of the UK banning all psychoactive substances when they got tired of playing whack-a-mole with what the press called "designer drugs", that hadn't technically been banned but which acted exactly the same as things which had been.
No way the US threatened troops into the Netherlands, and the Dutch would have never capitulated. At all.
All of Western Europe would join in.
The best I can figure is the US threatened to extract someone in an op. That's not invasion, and even that seems hard to buy.
So link please. And to a real news source, not some guy going on about it on tiktok or youtube, or a blog by a random person.
I'm a Canuck, but you need to call a thing what it is.
For example, sanctions could be something done as part of this bill. Arresting a Dutch person on US soil.
You may not like this bill, and I personally don't have much of an opinion on it, but it does not say "arrest and we will immediately invade and blow up cities and take control of your entire nation". It isn't even directed at the Netherlands directly, instead the court, wherever that may be now or in the future.
Saying "The threatened to invade" is an effort to put the worst possible spin on it. And without context, it makes it sound like this happened 2 weeks ago, such as "The US moved a carrier group to the coast of the Netherlands, and they're threatening to invade!"
The only way I would accept language like "threatened to invade" would be if it was actually threatened.
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All EU countries bend their backs when US say so.
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It's not an entity of the Netherlands government in any respect.
As far as the actual country of Netherlands goes, the United States and that country have a standard extradition treaty, as the US does with most countries that have a reasonable court system that protects the rights of the accused.
The US views the ICC as an illegitimate kangaroo court that does not meet the minimum standards for such protection, and thus does not recognize it any more than it would recognize, say, a terrorist-run "Islamic court". If such "courts" grab US citizens and put them "on trial", then, yeah, they shouldn't be surprised when US Navy SEALs coming crashing through their windows. That wouldn't make it an "invasion" of the country where the "court" was located, but something more akin to a hostage rescue mission.
No, it doesn't, which is why it makes referrals to the ICC. The US just believes that the US, uniquely, should not be subject to any external accountability, because it uniquely can be trusted to hold its own war criminals accountable without such external fallback.
Yes, actually, it does.
https://2001-2009.state.gov/t/pm/rls/fs/23428.htm
In part: "We object, however, to the investigation or prosecution of our citizens by the ICC, whose jurisdiction we have not consented to and which lacks necessary safeguards to ensure against politically motivated investigations and prosecutions."
Read the whole thing.
It worked...at what, exactly? I mean, leaving aside whether what was in question was actually a threat, I don't see that it has had any substantive effect on the policy either of the Netherlands or of the particular international institution headquartered in The Hague that that was its subject, so I don't see how it can be described as working like a charm, except as a piece of US domestic propaganda (which was its real purpose, of course.)
Grandstanding over power instead of just writing better rules doesn't seem like a great approach. Other people do all the difficult stuff, because if they stop they don't get paid. Getting paid (and lauded) for doing a bad job writing down some rules and complaining when they're followed is not great.
so if the law is permissive enough it allows easily getting around it, they can just rewrite the laws or go after nvidia directly for breaking the "spirit" of the law
The legal obligation is to comply with what the law actually says, not what the legislator possibly had in mind when they wrote the law...
Judges absolutely do look at the intent of lawmakers and rule on that intent.
Here if the law says "don't sell A to China" then you don't sell A to China but obviously you're free to sell B or C if you want to, you can't claim that the "spirit" and what was actually meant was not to sell anything at all...
I am binge watching Last Week Tonight, and around s2e20(?) there is a Supreme Court ruling that interpreted something about medical care that if read literally (it has the word "state") would mean "each State individually" which would allow each state to slap it down, OR by the wider meaning of the word 'state' aka the central Government. So there are authorities in the US that very much interpret laws to capture the meaning.
This should be obvious. They're changing the rules because the intention of the rule was being violated via a loophole that wasn't obvious when the rule was first made.
> Their incompetence is at best causing a lot of wasted effort.
It's unclear if you're saying the intention of the rule is bad, or merely the way the rule was implemented is bad. If you're talking about the former, you haven't justified that position. If you're talking about the latter, then you are fixating on an irrelevant detail that will be corrected and should step back and look at the bigger picture.
I don't think triumphalistic declarations of war from legislators who have just written a badly worded law should be celebrated. If that's not big picture enough, either justify why that is, or please refrain from telling me what I should be talking about.
Everything on the permissible side of the line we draw will be done. This is the entire purpose of having a line separating options into permissible and forbidden. So we shouldn't cross our fingers and lie about where we want the line to be drawn; we should make sure we draw the line where we actually want it to be.
If we don't want Nvidia selling anything at all in China, we need to say so already, rather than just shouting at them for doing things we said they were allowed to do.
Or are they hoping that China will give in to some political demand?
Probably this. Many in the foreign policy establishment expect a war with China within 10 years.
Not really. It is to hinder the economic and technological development of China.
This is a tricky one where it’s a lose/lose for Nvidia.
They have a fiduciary responsibility to investors to drive more revenue (while being compliant with laws), US gov doesn’t like that Nvidia is driving sales while technically being compliant to the letter of the law.
So it really isn't that tricky at all.
Any bets on how long until Chinese chips are the cutting edge on the planet?
There was a hack on 23andme.. if I was China/Russia, and it would be me hacking 23andme then I would have a wealth of information about children out of wedlock (blackmail), sick people (bribing), etc.
And US never stole secrets?
And then there's a moment of cultural confusion as the younger generation of parents looks at the person attempting blackmail and says "Correct, we couldn't afford the wedding. Were you offering to pay for one?"
Right now SMIC can produce 5 nm and 7 nm chips. That means about 5 years difference. I guess they can catch up in a decade if they invest enough resources, and will.
Having a domestic chip industry will be a huge win for China. Not only the chips will be much cheaper for them but they can export a ton while undercutting the competition. They will try to eat TSM, Samsung, Intel, AMD pies.
The West pretends that Taiwan is another country with another totally alien set of people who hate the mainland. However, that is not really the case. I imagine it's fairly easy to poach TSMC personnel, who well now realize that Taiwanese semi-conductor industry is going to be ruined by American meddling in the coming decade (much like they did of Japan's).
They already did that. They offered some TSMC engineers much better payment and they built 5nm and 7nm fab processes for SMIC using DUV instead of EUV. :)
To add insult to the injury, Huawei released their Kirin 9000s CPU during US secretary of commerce visit in China.
Is having one really fast and big chip that much better than having 10x 5 year old chips? (I have no idea how many chips they can produce, just wondering if being second really is that bad.)
The US gov created some rules which basically set some limit on the max bi-directional bandwidth of the chip, the max number of operations per second (4800 TOPS), and in the latest regulation they added another rule around “performance density”.
So basically they said something like: if you make a chip that has (in my arbitrary units) less than 100 TOPS, 500 bandwidth, and 200 performance density, then it’s OK to go to China.
So Nvidia made a chip that has 99 TOPS, 499 bandwidth, and 199 performance, which of course would be legal to export. And now the government is saying, well, we don’t like that. Which doesn’t make a lot of sense to me given they previously said they were OK with chips not hitting those limits being exported.
I don’t think you can blame Nvidia for taking the government at face value, assuming the government picked what they consider to be good values for their “chip banning equation” and then making chips that apply to the new rule.
This just seems to me like the US gov doesn’t know what they want exactly and thus keeps changing their regulation, none of which is a surprise to me. The whole thing reeks of incompetence.
They know exactly what they want. Writing regulations to attain that without too many unintended consequences or negative impacts on the US is the difficult part.
Banning AI chips exports will have the same effect.
Long term US will lose money from sales while China will use their newly developed industries to earn more.
This move is only to win some votes at the next elections.
Reminds me of the Crypto ban that the USGOV was trying to impose in the 90s. Utter idiots running things as always.
Regulators made educated guess to legislate it as XYZ fixed levels of compute that's fraction of current compute, which doesn't scale, reasoning it will increase compute gap over time. Nvidia obeys law, because I surmise even they don't know what threshold of compute translates to what potential military capabilities - it would be crazy if were so integrated into US MIC that they do.
Queue Raimondo fires warning shot at Nvidia for following law. The logic behind these moves is to make doing business with PRC expensive in the hopes uncertainty would compel AI sector to reduce business with PRC out of their own volition. Because when US gov doesn't actually know how to regulate compute controls, thereby can't effectively regulate with rule of law, they resort to rule by law (PRC playbook) to shape behaviour. A few flip flops might seem like regulatory incompetence, but enough sustained flip flops to create enviroment of uncertainty is strategy.