Indeed. But that US government control is limited to adding restrictions and removing them again, or offering money, it can't magic things out of the air when other people or nations put restrictions on them. And that's even absent Trump being an idiot who had to be talked out of killing the goose while it was laying golden eggs: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-considered-breaking-nvi...
For example, if China looks at the chaos that has been Russia attempting to take Ukraine and the USA attempting to control Iran and thinks "Amateurs" right before doing the same to Taiwan, the GPU supply takes a massive dive. And if North Korea goes after South Korea, RAM gets even harder to buy.
And if the EU says no more ASML sales outside the EU, that delays factories outside the EU by a few more years than they'd otherwise take.
But in the other direction, if NVIDIA's only thing is IP, and the IP is tied to a nation which thinks everyone else on the planet is hostile, that IP may not get protected very well. Right now this is unthinkable, but 5 months ago so was Trump threatening force to take Greenland.
I’m arguing that there can’t be a separation. You said ASML and restrict exports to US fabs but ASML rely on American suppliers like Cymer for the laser.
A separation of what? Reads like you mean "Europe and the US"?
For stuff like these examples, oh yes it can separate. It would be painful to replace, but even supply chain destruction (i.e. even if substitution isn't ready to replace the severed connections) is absolutely a possibility - to think otherwise is the mistake Russia made about its supply of fuel to the EU allowing it to take Ukraine without consequence.
Right now, the EU is looking at Trump and thinking he's arrogant enough to try military action against us. Canada and Mexico are hopefully making similar plans.
But even without Trump, we can't trust China not to call Taiwan's bluff on using TSMC as a hostage against being invaded, nor against the North/South Korean conflict resuming.
You can't separate such that you can't rely on OpenAI and Anthropic but you can rely on Nvidia, chips, and other software and hardware that make AI work.
There's going to be other people working on the hardware separately to this. Hard to do, of course. Protectionism is a painful defenseive measure.
> you can't rely on OpenAI and Anthropic but you can rely on Nvidia, chips
Depends how hard you burn them. GPUs in this usage wear out fast from electromigration, but "we have no new ones and what we have lasts 9 months" is very different from "SaaS contract got Force Majure'd overnight".
All the EU sovreign cloud stuff right now is because governments fear Trump may invade, threaten to ban business immediately if we resist; SaaS cancellations cause harm instantly, before he TACOs out, whereas a hardware supply stop we may outlast him being told "no" by the stock market.
For example, if China looks at the chaos that has been Russia attempting to take Ukraine and the USA attempting to control Iran and thinks "Amateurs" right before doing the same to Taiwan, the GPU supply takes a massive dive. And if North Korea goes after South Korea, RAM gets even harder to buy.
And if the EU says no more ASML sales outside the EU, that delays factories outside the EU by a few more years than they'd otherwise take.
But in the other direction, if NVIDIA's only thing is IP, and the IP is tied to a nation which thinks everyone else on the planet is hostile, that IP may not get protected very well. Right now this is unthinkable, but 5 months ago so was Trump threatening force to take Greenland.