I also read somewhere (not Wikipedia) that they trained on ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini queries, basically feeding in the output of competitor’s LLMs as training data. Kinda surprised they didn’t run into model collapse problems, but they stole their training data from other people who stole their training data from data collections that arguably stole them from content creators. It’s bandits all the way down, so adding a little smuggling to that doesn’t surprise me.
Implying it’s *morally* wrong for a Chinese company to bypass US sanctions is hilarious. You really say that with a straight face when even the president admits this is only protectionism?
These export controls increasingly look like "tax".
The White House said the US government would take a 25 percent cut of the chip’s sales, similar to a deal with AMD and Nvidia earlier this year that allowed them to sell lower-powered AI chips to China while paying the US government 15 percent of the proceeds.
Technically, yes. The CCP, though, wants to incentivize Chinese firms to use domestically-manufactured chips.
https://www.silicon.co.uk/e-innovation/artificial-intelligen... / https://archive.vn/B2pah
This couldn’t be playing out better for Xi. Trump is China’s best president.
I used to think Trump was clueless and being outplayed, but now I realize he’s just looting and couldn’t care less about protectionism or the American worker.
Every single action from this administration can be explained by greed and ego.
Eradicate the Republican party as an organization, split the Democrats into "normal right" and "maybe a bit left" factions, and see if you can get preference voting in there as well while asking for a pony.
The CIA (and every other intelligence org.) is literally a weapon designed to operate in the grey area to fit the mandate of the policy makers and elected leadership. Many of the things they do are questionable or worse. In the case of the DoD, they do these things at the behest of democratically elected leadership.
Of course US and China will operate in their own best interests. Of course they will both play chess, both name call, both sanction and impede. When it's not a hot war, it is still a never-ending battle for each country's total economic, soft, and hard power market share.
This is every country.
It's geopolitics.
Competition is inevitable, especially between geopolitical rivals, but we don't have to engage in Minitrue-style "the enemy has always been our enemy" rhetoric.
It would be interesting to see what life would be like today had that not happened. It might be better, it might be worse. Probably a little of both for different groups of people.
As the world returns to multi-polarity, there are signs of increases in violence.
The last time the world had multi-polarity, we had far more wars. Including the worst wars the world has ever seen.
Citations? Simply saying that World War 1 happened during a time of multi-polarity is just begging the question. Multi-polarity of varying degrees has always been the case throughout human history, and often times single-polarity is achieved only through extreme violence.
A big reason for that, as far as I can tell, is that if one side has the USA on its side, they're basically unattackable for many places since the USA is so over powered militarily and can project force anywhere
It stands to reason as the USA recedes from the world's stage it will get more violent as more nations stand at parity with their adversaries again. And we're certainly seeing wars cropping up lately as the US continues to undermine its traditional allies, bully adversaries, declare trade wars, and withdraw from agreements.
Pax Americana, by contrast, was essentially a standoff between ideological opposites that were equipped with enough nuclear weapons to assure mutual destruction. The choices were clear - coexist or die, and there were many opportunities where we narrowly escaped the second option.
You could point to many possible causes of WW1, but I think that a lot of the causes can be traced back to a hot-headed emperor who desired a larger and more prestigious empire but lacked the statecraft to do so without pissing off nearly all of his neighbors. Looking around at our world today at the number of unserious leaders who govern like a bull in a china shop, I would be lying if I didn't see any similar causes for concern.
https://davidgraeber.org/books/the-dawn-of-everything-a-new-...
Which is to say, in a world that's -- you know -- a society; not screwing over the other guy is often, if not usually, a good way to "optimize your own citizens economic prospects," too.
The CI is, in my experience, not a moral system about personal or group advantage, but about rules the can govern everybody.
There is some truth, but this is how you get a crappy-ass intelligence agency.
Good intelligence agencies are focused on gathering intelligence, not performing random tasks that benefit from secrecy.
Surely there are constraints on this, because otherwise, it would be the moral imperative of every country to enslave non-citizens for the benefit of (some subset of) citizens.
Moral???
*operate in areas too dark for Anish Kapoor
> When it's not a hot war, it is still a never-ending battle
no, battle is not a moral imperative.
"Moral imperative"? No country was ever created out of a moral imperative. None. Also, no country was ever created to optimize for its citizens' economic prospects. Every country was created by the elites for the benefits of the elites.
The intent is there.
It's an incredibly complex distributed system with millions of actors and interactions, entrenched powers, regulatory capture, Citizens United, etc. It has to be defended and garbage collected.
stated intent goes nowhere to the harm done.
The declaration of independence was written by one of the wealthiest slave owners in the country. "Moral imperative" was certainly not behind the american revolution. The economic interests of the elites were. There are no saints in politics. Just interests - mostly of the elites.
The concept of morality in this context is absurd.
Nobody can claim moral superiority.
(Yes, there have been situations that are similar in theme, but they paw in comparison to that incident.)
And for GPU trips without a country in between, the plausible deniability is close to zero.
This is just model distillation.
Anyone with the expertise to build a model from scratch (which DeepSeek certainly can) can do this in a careful manner.
> but they stole their training data from other people who stole their training data from data collections that arguably stole them from content creators.
Bingo.
I have no problem with pirates pirating other pirates.
Screw OpenAI and Anthropic closed source models built from public data. The law should be that weights trained from non-owned sources should be public domain, or that any copyright holder can sue them and demand model takedown.
Google and Meta are probably the only two AI companies that have a right to license massive amounts of training data from social media and user file uploads given that their ToSes grant them these rights. But even Meta is pirating stuff.
Even if OpenAI and Anthropic continue pirating training data and keeping the results closed, China's open source strategy will win out in the end. It erodes the crust of value that is carefully guarded by the American giants. Everyone else will be integrating open models and hacking them apart, splicing them in new ways.
For the sake of someone unfamiliar... Why is that?
Did they pay teams of monkeys to generate their own, novel training data? Or gain explicit, opt-in permission from users who entrust them with their files/content?
I edited my comment, but basically they both own massive social media properties (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook) or file upload sites (Google Drive, Google Photos, Gmail) and their ToSes grant them these rights. You accept these terms when you use their services.
That's not great, but we are getting free services. It's in the terms.
It's a whole lot better than just scraping without permission, compensation, acknowledgement, or even notice.
To be clear, I have no problem with these models being built. But if they "steal" the data, the resultant model shouldn't be owned by anyone. It should be public domain and not allowed to be kept as a trade secret.
And it's funny that Anthropic is trying to depress our wages by training on our code. Again - I'm fine with that - I want to work faster, and I like these models and their capabilities. But Anthropic shouldn't be able to own the models they train off of us exclusively since they didn't license or buy our data. They provided us with nothing at all.
Google most likely did something similar, just using books they already had indexed in Google Books, and probably by still seriously violating any reasonable notion of copyright
I certainly didn't*. I'd love to see litigation testing just how solid those insidious opt-in-by-default schemes are as a basis for "ownership".
If they had users explicitly opt-in with a "Yes, go ahead and train on my stuff and by the way I assert that I have all the rights to grant you the same", I'd have no problem with that, and they'd have a much stronger claim.
(*Before others inevitably disagree: I do opt-out of this stuff aggressively, and further send notice to companies from time to time that I don't agree to certain objectionable clauses of their ToS and they're welcome to close my account).
And then you stopped using their service right?
Other times they turn a blind eye and choose to provide the service (and collect my money) despite the lack of agreement to some part of their standard terms and their tacit acknowledgement that I didn't accept them. On two occasions their legal team responded and said "that's fine", and once they actually fixed their ToS.
People who didn't grow up dealing with paper contracts where you could easily redline and send back for countersigning don't seem to understand that you don't just need to blindly say "yes" to everything a company tries to foist upon you.
It's not that simple. The EU may be the only ones to have codified that, but there's centuries of case law in other jurisdictions dealing with ownership, that once the matter hits litigation might turn out to say something other than these tech companies would like.
This is an absurd concept when it comes to international trade. Even intellectual property is mostly meaningless outside a state. Of course people will evade sanctions; what is the us going to do, invade singapore or malaysia?
In this case it's just wrong. I don't know what people think "e-waste" recycling actually is or what happens to their "unrepairable" units after they rid themselves of them.
> Even intellectual property is mostly meaningless outside a state.
Interestingly the Dollar is most definitely meaningful outside of our state. I think the assumption becomes, that if this is true, then using it's power to enforce trade sanctions isn't that big a stretch.
> Of course people will evade sanctions
What's less clear if they should expect their government to actively help them in this evasion or not. I think the Chinese citizens are in unique international territory here.
> what is the us going to do, invade singapore or malaysia?
Deny our exports to them. This will cost the political donor class a lot of profits. So this is why it doesn't get done.
None of this is a fait accompli. This is the result of years of intentional corruption of the core systems involved.
Embargoes aren't impossible to enforce against the foreign importer. If a foreign entity is found to have placed orders with false documents, they can be sanctioned, which can be enforced against any of their international operations. It makes it hard for them to do future business in global markets. I would not recommend violating US sanctions no matter where you are.
Expecting to strangle world markets with intellectual property as your moat is absurd. You can only fight honest competition with dishonest means for so long, and intellectual property is one of the dirtiest tricks in the book.
Open always beats closed. Drain the moats. Starve the ClosedAI beast.
Clean room design is not new (or illegal), but it's always been a form of stealing
Strictly speaking, it's not illegal for them to acquire it, it's illegal for an exporter in the US to sell (even if transitively) to them.
That the discussion has being hijacked and shifted to moral superiority is really unfortunate, because that was never the point in the first place.
All the labs permitting synthetic data do that.
If only. That's my dream, massive copyright lawsuits against all of these AI players and maybe the courts can do something good for a change, put an end to all of this AI bullshit
Not sure why you would expect this, all the models started doing this as its much more cost effective to get data for post training don't you remember the first grok release where many times it started replies "as a model trained by openai..."
LOL. Distillation doesn't count as plagiarism, or you should call Meta out on it. They're distilling the Chinese model.
Ref: https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/business/inside-meta-s-piv...
but maybe i gave it a gracious reading.
So my 4090 (24 GB) is probably going to get turned into a 48/96 GB VRAM frankenstein in a Chinese chop shop. I haven't watched the full 3.5 hour documentary you linked but from the first few minutes, it seems quite interesting. And covers this exact thing.
Edit: Again, I checked the address, it was a house, not a freight forwarder warehouse. And if it was actually going to AU, the forwarder would be on the west coast in CA/WA, not east coast (had another order go to Thailand with a forwarder in SF. And Miami is the big hub for South America). For legit freight forwarding they also wouldn't have different names on the account & shipping address. As the parent comment's YT video describes, these are often just normal Chinese-Americans or international students who do this to make a bit of extra money.
Is it safe to transact with people who use freight forwarders in your experience? Do you lose any protections?
Out of fear, in my cases, I cancelled the auctions.
On second thought though, I wonder if it's actually the buyer using the service that is more at risk (introduction of 3rd party, more complex delivery, probably impossible to return, etc)
I have my eBay account set this way, and I still get bids from overseas accounts -- I always Google the shipping address, 100% of the time it has been a package forwarder.
I would like to point out that in Australia and NZ, it can be a massive pain to find someone who will ship internationally.
Normally this is for things like Amazon US, and other US-based companies. There are services[1][2] that advertise virtual postal addresses in your purchase-country where they’ll box and ship it to you.
So yes, a Chinese name based in Australia with a shipping address in the US isn’t immediately a red flag. Lots of Chinese in Australia and NZ, and lots of people here like to use shipping services like this.
1. https://www.nzpost.co.nz/tools/you-shop
2. https://www.choice.com.au/shopping/online-shopping/buying-on... (Scroll to bottom)
And a good thing, too, or I would be concerned about posting that I knew it was going somewhere forbidden.
Cool, though. Where can I buy one? :p
Edit: just for fun (and actual neighbor of China), tried Ebay India too, seems not-impossible: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=blackwell+gpu&_sacat=0&...
Eh, you'd have to cross the Himalayas and go through what is kind of a military zone.
Kazakhstan and Vietnam are more suitable candidates, but neither has actually good infrastructure connectivity to China.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/09/china-blocks-sal...
> The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) told companies, including ByteDance and Alibaba, this week to end their testing and orders of the RTX Pro 6000D, Nvidia’s tailor-made product for the country, according to three people with knowledge of the matter
We have someone in the comments section talking about how they encountered a bunch of suspicious bidders on their GPU auction. That's not what happens when people care about being potentially investigated for breaking export rules.
A person with a Chinese name living in Delaware? Gasp.
Sanctioned goods could be used to spread propaganda though, imagine, for example, if installing a NVIDIA GPU driver required answering questions about Tiananmen square incident.
[0] https://www.history.com/articles/iran-contra-affair#Oliver-N...
If anything, the hundreds of millions of dollars from AI lobbyists would overwhelmingly support anything that would prevent anyone outside of the US getting their hands on computer chips.
The AI lobby in support of banning export of chips is way greater than anyone lobbying the opposite.
> should we investigate? Nah, our donors […]
The US government is a very slow moving bureaucracy. Slower to adapt than the slowest moving large public company.
The GPU chip issue came about suddenly, out of the blue, and caught the government unprepared. When that happens, it typically takes government years to catch up and figure out how to adapt.
Even in cases where incentives are aligned in favor of the government’s position, they still take forever to roll out meaningful change with effective enforcement - e.g. charging sales tax on software business, remember that Supreme Court case years ago? Or remember all the concern about engineer salaries being de-categorized as R&D? These are examples that are legally decided but gov is incredibly slow to enforce. The Wayfair supreme court case was back in 2018, right? Many years later, most SaaS companies are still getting away with not charging sales tax. Certain states are just now stating to enforce, 7 years later.
Not to discount how negative free speech restrictions are, but I’m not so sure how effective that particular propaganda campaign would be.
If you post about the 1989 incident on Weibo, it will absolutely get removed and you might get the local police visiting you -- depending on how much time they have on their hands and how incendiary your post was.
Probably true. Right up to the point where they attract a little too much attention, or annoy the wrong party official. Then all that they said becomes evidence of their crimes.
> The US bans the sale of these advanced semiconductors to China
Whoa there, Bloomberg; just because the USA bans the sale of something to your country doesn't make it banned in your country.
Many Americans, including their government, seem to think that US laws apply globally.
They have extradited Ukrainian men from Poland because that Ukrainian was running a torrent website (illegal in the US, not illegal in Ukraine nor Poland).
They tried getting an Australian extradited from Sweden and the UK for supposedly hosting a website that contained information the US government considered illegally obtained.
More egregiously, they have kidnapped tens to hundreds of people from various countries, sometimes on reasons as flimsy as watch model or name, to torture (sometimes to death), because a lawyer working for the president decided that's actually legal because they're waves hands "enemy combattants".
Can't be!
When a US soldier was photographed in Vietnam waterboarding a vietnamese PoW he got 22 years of prison.
Then came 2002 and rule of law stopped applying.
Really? Did he serve more than a month? Because if the people who committed My Lai for off with slaps on the wrist, I can't imagine something as trivial as waterboarding would get any serious consequences.
I am not able to find more information about the court martialed soldier, but the fact that he was sentenced to 22 years of prison is a quote from a lecture of professor Sarah Paine from the US Navy War Academy.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Waterboarding_a_captured_...
[0]: https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/9/17/china-bans-tech-...
I'm sure they have knowledge of it being backdoored or underpowered/buggy.
acting like china wouldn't doing the same thing to other country if they ever weld such position
every great power would do the same thing to defend their position, its not unique to the US. only because current incumbent power is we see things this way
If that's the mentality, then what's worth fighting over? We should give up because we don't even deserve the rewards.
its not make the world worse but simply take what matters to your group
does that evil??? hmmm noo, people call it patriotism
what do you think entire US military base reside in 80% of the world btw????? does US military doing picnic on these country?????
I can tell you answer but some people didn't want to confront reality and would be downvote me to hell
but in the end someone gotta to do it
if china was in the same position as the us it would just be the us; obviously this is not inherent to nationality, but material conditions
This discussion where China is always purely dishonest, bad etc. without any context is honestly lame.
The Chinese ban is largely a political move designed to signal that they're not going to be pushed around. They pretty much know companies are using them, (and H100 in Thailand etc.) but as long as it sends a message and over time incentives domestic development, (which it does), then good as far as they're concerned.
It's certainly better than the EU just rolling over for King Donald, which as a EU citizen is embarrassing.
I'm seeing it more as buying time thing. In sourcing as much as possible in the EU is already in progress, as well as various trade agreements with different countries and economic blocs. That doesn't mean it isn't preferable to play nice with the demented guy to make the transition less painful in the short term.
On diplomatic trips, it often 'lectures' others, rather than listens. I think the EU is less and less liked by these other countries too, which is a disastrous combination when coupled with where the US is at imo.
Like when?
This is not good diplomacy.
> Guo noted that the Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression was an important part of the World Anti-Fascist War. 80 years ago, the Chinese people made tremendous national sacrifices to save human civilization
Lol, that particular part is hilarious. Imperial Japan wasn't drastically different in terms of governance compared to Chiang's or Mao's China. All three were pretty brutal anti-democratic regimes. Chiang had pretty clear fascist inspirations too.
> showed a lack of basic historical knowledge
Indeed, Chinese propaganda doesn't concern itself with historical knowledge. Those are the same people who imagine claims to half of Southeast Asia.
But China is a bit like Russia, their foreign minister blabbers nonsense, but that doesn't prevent actual trade or deal making.
Imperial Japan being considered fascist is also quite the stretch. And importantly, neither of the two/myriad of Chinese entities was fighting "to preserve human civilisation". When they were fighting the Japanese for a change, it was because the Japanese were attacking them.
The article tries to position China as some "was fighting for good in WW2 so it's unfair to say current China is autocratic with it's buddies in NK and Russia". Even if it were true thay China was fighting for a good cause in WW2 (extremely debatable), doesn't in the slightest change the fact that today, China is an autocratic regime. How long is Xi's term? How long has he been in power? For how long will he be in power? It's the same story as Putin.
China's foreign minister might bitch about it all he wants, it's nothing but the truth. You can consider that autocratic regimes aren't inherently bad, and that's a debate to be had about upsides and downsides. But it is categorically nonsense to pretend that China isn't autocratic.
But let's not pretend China doesn't use their influence to keep other countries down as well, and let's not pretend they allow a fair playing field for foreign competitors domestically either.
The US would not have imposed these targeted sanctions if China simply wanted to fairly compete in the marketplace.
But the "banned" chips this article is referring to and the original chips act is from the Biden administration, having nothing to do with the current tariff climate.
Also, obviously US actions have nothing to do with free market maximalism. Nor does China feel that way either. Which is my point.
Total historical illiteracy. if only there was an island nation immediately southeast of the US we could look to for information on how America treats countries that try the whole "back off" thing
I've rented H100s no problem on American servers and there's no KYC or anything, they let anybody do it.
US authorities are ok with Chinese companies accessing GPUs in overseas DCs because those DCs will still be subject any US export controls. Right now, we don’t really care if Chinese companies are building tier-2 LLMs on US gear. If China invades Taiwan or frontier models approach AGI, we will shut down those Malaysian and Thai data centers overnight.
What realistically could happen? Nvidia is already prohibited from selling their GPUs to China, I guess if you wanted it to really stop, you'd need to prohibit Nvidia from selling GPUs in any other country but the US, and require some sort of government controlled license to be able to buy it inside the US. Neither of which sound like realistic options.
So what could anyone really do, to "solve" this "problem"?
You log into the Nvidia Enterprise Portal and download a license file that is temporary valid (e.g. 7 days) and bound to the specific serial numbers.
You transfer that file to your local license (DLS) server.
It does not need to be permanently connected to the internet, but it needs to be refreshed periodically.
Your local server now holds the tickets that the GPUs need to use to run (obviously checked by the GPU itself, not on a driver-level, though driver could be a first step).
https://docs.nvidia.com/license-system/dls/index.html
If an account is suspected of violation, they get suspended and need to pass the KYC again.
It's not perfect (as violators can use shell companies), but it is relatively elegant. In case of shell companies, they can get caught one day or another.
Regular users or those who don’t need air-gapped network can just stay online and the lease automatically renew in the background. Friction-less.
Added benefit: nobody is going to try to steal your cards
Minus: enshittification of the world in the name of politics, and Nvidia will lose sales, and backfire at the US economy
I hope they don't plan it
The Chinese government has done more for less so I wouldn't be so certain.
China instructed companies to stop using nvidia chips too...knowing fully well it'll not stop. It achieves their aim though - a strong nudge in the direction of independence.
Much of Chinese top level direction seems to be that way - indicating direction of travel and implied future threats for companies not rowing in said direction
As for the US side of the ban - that's about as sound as the war on drugs. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together knows that's futile
Shortly thereafter people realized they were probably just evading sanctions and ~stealing~ bootstrapping parameters from other models to reach their stated training cost. This report is just further reporting on that rumor.
Through sanctions, the irony is that the west removed the incentive for China to respect IP laws.
Well done.
If they can solve the lithography/ASML issue by getting access to it, then they will be forced to win.
Unlike your typical free market fanboy, the Chinese leadership isn't stupid. They were always planning to do that, sanctions or no.
Realistically, all sanctions can do is mess with their timelines for some temporary strategic advantage, slowing some things down and forcing reallocation of investment away from other areas into the sanctioned areas.
The US refraining from sanctions is likely the stupid move, because that lever of control will expire at some point. To not use it is to squander it.
But if there's one thing the US government and its business elite is good at, it's squandering things.
It's ridiculous to think they won't succeed, just by dint of sheer numbers alone.
The plans weren't wishes, they were things they were actively working on to make happen. The point is they didn't need "Trump's erratic and corrupt trade policy" to motivate it, they were already motivated to do it anyway.
The US's problem is that its actions are uncoordinated. Sanctions and tariffs need to be coupled with massive investments to build new capabilities, and the latter is usually lacking. For instance, tariff revenue (and then some) should be poured directly into subsidies for building new facilities that support critical industries (like rare earths and electronics manufacturing). And things would probably be counterintuitively more effective if there was more tolerance of waste For instance, China's subsidized hundreds of solar panel manufacturers, none of them make money and a lot have probably failed, but the vicious domestic competition has helped them dominate that technology globally. The US freaked out in a massive scandal when one subsidized solar panel maker went out of business.
Yes, they were "actively working on it"; no, they had made little significant progress despite throwing tons of money at the initiative.
There were lots of stories along the lines of https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/19/technology/china-microchi... from the early 2020s, not so many lately. Their internal posture will now be the same as Russia's post-1945 push for the Bomb. Continued failure will (possibly literally) place heads at stake.
The US's problem is that its actions are uncoordinated.
They are coordinated well enough, but with the goal of magnifying Cheeto Benito's personal influence and cultivating his in-group's fortunes.
That's how things sometimes go when you're building up a capability. I'm sure they were going to work through the setbacks, regardless.
>> The US's problem is that its actions are uncoordinated.
> They are coordinated well enough, but with the goal of magnifying Cheeto Benito's personal influence and cultivating his in-group's fortunes.
No. That problem is bigger than the Trump administrations, focusing on him is lazy.
It's absurd to say that without elaborating on how anyone else was "just as bad," which I expect will be a key part of your next reply.
Trump is fucking bad, and if you disagree after all we've seen, you're either arguing in bad faith, or you're not such a great person yourself. He is costing us every jot and tittle of soft power we ever wielded as a nation.
Trump is the living embodiment of the old cliché about how in the Chinese language, the words for "threat" and "opportunity" are similar. His actions have comforted Russia, alienated Europe, and galvanized China.
> Trump is fucking bad, and if you disagree after all we've seen, you're either arguing in bad faith, or you're not such a great person yourself. He is costing us every jot and tittle of soft power we ever wielded as a nation.
Sorry dude, all of that is coming from inside your own head. You're so blinded by Trump that you're incapable of having this conversation.
I don't want to put in the effort to try to fix that. Have a nice day.
Competition's software stack have to be good enough that it is worth migrating over and I think till we get some kind of cross vendor API for that it won't happen for a while
Nvidia sells to Bob
Bob sells to China
Bob is a citizen of Ω
and forcing them to allow opium to be sold in their country
and forcing them to give up major port cities and open up trade against their wishes
Honestly whenever China gets around to getting its served-extremely-cold revenge for all the savagery committed against it in the 19th and 20th centuries, some chips are going to be the least of everyone's problems.
This is what living in the ashes of an empire does to you.
Will come for the USA in time.
We've also seen this with sanctions on Russia but they still somehow bought a bunch of TI chips for missiles [1].
As many here know, the US restricts the export of certain technology to China because reasons. This includes lithography machines from ASML, a Dutch company, who have a monopoly on the latest EUV processes. It's geopolitically interesting that the big buyer of ASML products are TSMC in TAiwan as well as Samsung in South Korea (and possibly Japan?).
I expect this will become a national security issue for China and long-term you will see China try and replicate the best lithographic processes and chips such that the gap will greatly narrow. This will take years and involves a lot of depenedent industries but of anyone China has shown the willingness, ability and resolve to pursue decades-long infrastructure and national security projects.
In the meantime, bans on GPU exports to China will continue to be circumvented (eg [2]) and honestly there's no real reason for those export restrictions anyway.
[2]: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/us-justice-department-ac...
Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek has relied on Nvidia Corp. chips that are banned in the country
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/nvidia-shares-gain-trump...
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-bans-foreign-ai-ch...
They are still training with less than 1/10 of what the US companies do own, and yet having similar results.
China is killing it.
If demand of companies like deepseek has already been served, will they buy significant volume of additional products from nvidia once it is "legal" again?
It feels like the initiative of US politics to unblock nvidia China sales might not be very fruitful.
You just need any company outside china that isn't under sanction to buy them and then sell them.
Even further, you can skip the hardware buying entirely and set some shell company to buy compute from the dozens of vendors.
Sounds straight out of sci-fi.
And American cigarettes were popular in Canada in the 90’s and 00’s. IIRC the Turkish tobacco blended in was banned by the Canadian state dept so theirs were garbage. Meanwhile Americans were flying into Canada in order to fly to Cuba.
nvidia is facing a lot of competitive threats and their moat is being filled in. Google with their Ironwood TPU. Amazon with Trainium3. Even Apple is adding tensor cores to their chips, and if Apple went big scale it would be legitimate in the space as well.
We know that China has a number of upstart TPU vendors, and Huawei has built some "better than H200" solutions with a roadmap to much higher heights.
So there is suddenly a bunch of secret-source reports that no, China actually is totally reliant on nvidia. nvidia needs this to be true, or at least people to believe it to be true.
I mean, after all the fanfare about the H200 being allowed to be exported, nvidia shares...dropped. The market doesn't seem to be buying the China reliance bluster.
Presumably everything youre describing could be averted by simply air gapping the hardware? Or tightly controlling how data gets into and out of the system where the chips are used?
You give the tech too much credit.
Eventually China will make their own shovels to dig up the gold. I'm not sure what this would do to Nvidia, but I'm sure we will find out.
These concepts are the reason why during some periods flights to the US have had an uncanny number of pregnant women and flights back to China have had an uncanny number of newborn babies.
Now these babies are adults with US citizenship, with some who returned to the US after primary school and became fully fluent native English speakers, and some of whom may be thoroughly culturally loyal to the Chinese communist party. And 100% hireable by top US AI firms and working there as we speak.
It’s staring everyone right in the face, but it’s taboo to talk about, because people conflate concerns about cultural loyalty with racism.
I don’t dislike these people. I welcome them. I also hope they will learn the value of freedom and (representative) democracy. btw Taiwan is a litmus test. (If you are one of the people I’m speaking about, and you think it would be great if the CCP could take over Taiwan, your values are not aligned with freedom and democracy.)
The point is it’s just silly to think we can stay ahead of China. Some of their best researchers are embedded in some of our best teams.
Keeping the technology from our best researchers is not going to work imho. The only avenue I see is to try to culture hack the AI efforts, and maybe most of the researchers, to be well aligned as we go.