The Chinese government has done more for less so I wouldn't be so certain.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
[0] https://www.history.com/articles/iran-contra-affair#Oliver-N...
Through sanctions, the irony is that the west removed the incentive for China to respect IP laws.
Well done USA.
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 efficient if there was more tolerance of waste (e.g. China's subsidized hundreds of solar panel manufactures, none of them make money but the vicious domestic competition has helped them dominate that technology).
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.
There is nothing stopping some intermediary from buying them from a non-sanctioned country, and then reselling them to Chinese people. I don’t even think any laws would be broken in that case.
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.
I've rented H100s no problem on American servers and there's no KYC or anything, they let anybody do it.
Sounds straight out of sci-fi.
> 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.
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.
cultofmetatron•1h ago
smileson2•59m ago
inamorty•54m ago
mullingitover•57m ago
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.
codedokode•27m ago