[petcat]

Nvidia is subject to export restrictions on GPUs to China. So Chinese labs have responded by allowing American hosts to run their open-weight models in the US, where there are no restrictions. We see this in the EU too where Scaleway, and now Hetzner are getting into the inference host space serving Chinese open-weight models.

So Nvidia benefits from more inference providers running many Chinese models that they otherwise would not have been able to service.

[bee_rider]

Oh, that’s interesting. I think the general expectation was that blocking exports to China would result in companies there building their own cards competing with NVIDIA. If it has incentivized them to release open weight models instead, that seems like an unexpected win.

[jononor]

The cards are also coming... Some of the very first are already out - but it will take a couple of years before they hit their stride in full. And cards will likely be primarily for Chinese companies initially, and then go for exports later. So it will go under the radar for many western techies for a while. Seeing what China has managed with PCB production, low to mid-end semiconductors, phone manufacturing and electric I would hesitate to bet against them.

Nvidia is now lobbying to remove the export ban, to try to reduce the incentives for developing their own high-end LLM training/serving (and cash in on current demand).

[Danox]

Nvidia will fail in that respect. Sanctions and restrictions are too popular with the American government. Where the United States will lose, is that almost every country in the world that can will use other solutions not from the United States.

And unfortunately, we are losing credibility on all fronts in the last year and a half. I wonder why?

[brendoelfrendo]

It's all things at once. Perhaps it's incentivized the open weight strategy. It's also prompted Huawei to ramp up production of AI chips to try and create a local competitor to Nvidia. It's also also created a grey market for Nvidia chips within China.

[mathgeek]

> I think the general expectation was that blocking exports to China would result in companies there building their own cards competing with NVIDIA.

In the long run, perhaps, but it's a lot faster to scale up the capacity and usage of existing hardware/datacenters/grid, and even add new capacity to those, than it is to develop brand new GPU hardware and the fabrication of it.