The recent U.S. government restrictions on AI hardware exports to China have significantly impacted several key semiconductor players, including NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel, restricting them from selling high-performance AI chips to Chinese land. This ban has notably affected NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4090 ga...
So the sanctions are cutting into Nvidia’s profits while creating new jobs in China, and the upside to this is what exactly?
At the very least, it is causing some short- and medium-term trouble in China’s AI advancements. China has to build its own industries and architectures as they’re cut off from high-end processes in the West and SK/Taiwan. Companies like Alibaba and ByteDance used to buy Nvidia because domestic alternatives were uncompetitive. Now they’re forced to buy domestic, which is very good for China’s aspirations of Chip autonomy, but problematic in the short term.
The upside (if your goal is to hobble China) can only be evaluated in the future, based on how much China can catch up using indigenous processes. My impression is that they’re doing quite a bit better than expected, but obstacles (EUV especially) remain.
Why do you want to see trouble in China’s AI advancement?
There’s no stopping china w/ AI in the long term. All the US can do is slow them down and hopefully make sure America is sufficiently provisioned to deal with whatever China is cooking. That said, I don’t buy into the argument that slowly China down today is only going to speed them up later. China has been going full bore on silicon for a while and is spending and doing as much as possible to decouple from the west in these segments. So, yes, sanctions are an effective tool to slowing them down. China’s only speed is lightning fast. Sanctions puts them at more like “thunder fast”.
I half-agree with this. China has definitely been pushing for a domestic chip industry, but the Huawei debacle, and last year’s October surprise lit a fire under their feet. Both in terms of state funding, but especially because it forced the private sector to make changes.
We see China as this top-down governed behemoth, but this does not capture the whole picture. Most private companies operate in a relatively autonomous fashion. That is why until recently, most tech companies (Tencent, Baidu, ByteDance, even Huawei) were not interested in domestic chips: because they were uncompetitive. So they bought Nvidia, Qualcomm, and TSMC chips. Now, all their funds are going to domestic manufacturers, which is bad for the tech companies, but good for China’s goal of chip autonomy.
So my main argument is that China was indeed already doing a ton to decouple from the West before (and during the initial phase of) the sanctions, but the private sector has accelerated this shift out of necessity.
This does not mean that sanctions were a bad idea from the US perspective. Absent those, something like M60 Pro may have only been developed by 2026, but China would still be transitioning towards indigenous chip production – while also reaping the benefits (AI race, increased global profits bein funneled into R&D) of access to foreign tech.
why do we want to keep china down? so we can reign supreme at raping the world for it’s resources instead of them? lol
US doesn’t have a clear strategy. It was originally to keep China permanently under 14nm and when that failed, it switched to “slowing” without any clear objectives or definitions of success, at expense of Nvidia market access.
Success is slowing down China.
Long term, China is inevitably going to develop its own super intelligent AGI, and without those pesky safety filters.
Slowing them down gives breathing room.
It doesn’t do enough to slow them down, they made a breakthrough at 7nm. US policy wonks making up these sanctions don’t understand the tech and trying to balance economic interests.
The US and China are both preparing for war in the near future. China is building up their military power extremly fast, pumping out jets, ships, missiles, drones etc. and US is doing what it can to slow them down. It is inevitable that China will be able to manufacture their own chips, nothing will stop them.
Economic interests are lower priority.
Yup. This is pretty much the goal. Slow em down any way possible to keep that tech advantage.
Not enough, they are making breakthroughs, it’s nowhere close to stopping them.
Why?