| The Chinese do have their home grown GPUs too, although I have the impression that they're not super good. Even so, if we look at Groq / Cerebras, the fastest LLM inference companies: They're both based on architectures that are 7nm+, and so architectures that China can produce locally despite the export restrictions. Ultimately, the export controls are mainly just inconvenience. Not a real blocker. The Chinese don't need to achieve state of the art chip manufacturing to achieve SOTA AI outcomes. They just need to make custom silicon specialized for the kinds of AI algorithms they want to scale. Of course, at scale, that's going to mean that the US should eventually have both lower production costs, and energy use in consumer use of AI models, and that Chinese products will likely be more dependent on the cloud for at least the near future. The whole strategy seems ultimately meh in a long term sense... Mainly good for building up a sense of mutual enmity and dividing the world ... Which is also going to result in higher cost of living around the world as trade falters. Sad stuff. |
To be determined. PRC can shift compute costs by building cheaper energy. Also arguable they can drive hardware costs to be competitive - % of manufacturing cost of hardware is ~30-40%, PRC save 100s of billions not paying western IP and service fees with indigenous hardware depending on how much central gov wants to squeeze margins. Would not be surprised if they can roll out 4x-8x more 14nm for compute parity and still have cost advantage once they get domestic fabs up at scale.