[erwald]

Bans on Chinese open weight models being used in the US and bans on AI chips and semiconductor manufacturing equipment being exported to China are two extremely different things, and it's not inconsistent in any way to oppose one and endorse another.

[anonzzzies]

Banning hardware is helping China in the long run though. And long is not actually very long. They will beat 'the west' (even though they are all made in the east now) in semiconductors because of this nonsense within 50 years. And also in AI capabilities. Making capable adversaries more competitive and angry is often not really a great strategy.

[ozgung]

Nvidia CEO had a viral rant about this, implying they don’t really have a moat against China other than Chinese researchers _prefer_ to stay in the CUDA ecosystem. If you force them out then they are capable of building their own chips and ecosystem which may become the new industry standard outside America. He didn’t say this explicitly due to his role but implied that it can be easier than it looks and it’s more of a resource allocation problem.

[kaon_2]

Yes of course but the Nvidia CEO is hardly an unbiased observer. He wants to sell to China and is looking for arguments to build his case. Similarly to how Dario isn't an unbiased observer either. So who is? And who has the knowledge to say something meaningful? Universities? Professors?

[hnfong]

Jensen Huang is biased but if his interests align with yours (i.e. not wanting to concede the Chinese chip market by banning western exports) then maybe you should listen to him.

[doom2]

> bans on AI chips and semiconductor manufacturing equipment being exported

In some ways, a ban on semiconductor manufacturing equipment exports is also a good way to keep the price of consumer electronics and other goods that depends on memory high because of the potentially decade+ long shortage of RAM we're looking at. I wonder how people here would explain to someone outside the tech bubble how it's good, actually, that those prices keep rising because it means we're preventing China from getting better at AI.

[Paria_Stark]

It's good because I have not written a line of code nor thought for myself in a whole year man. And yet I can still get YC money don't you see?

[basch]

is it export if they take control of the entire island manufacturing it.

banning export is short sighted and doesnt address any problem at a scale longer than months or maybe at most a few years.

[ianm218]

The export controls on chips have been in place for many years at this point.

And China has invested immensely in sovereign chip industry for a long time and is still incredibly behind.

[adrian_b]

Unfortunately "incredibly behind" can be said about most countries of the world, many of which had electronics industries that have been destroyed during the nineties of the last century, but not about China.

China is already able to design and fabricate good enough CPUs, GPUs, DDR5 memories and flash memories.

For now, their fabrication costs are significantly higher than those of TSMC, Intel or Samsung, because they have to use expensive workarounds for not having access to EUV lithography.

Nonetheless, where the price does not matter much, like for supercomputers or military technology, China can afford to match or exceed the US capabilities with their internal production. With the high current prices for memories, the Chinese memory companies can obtain excellent profits with their products. Which is why the US congressmen John Moolenaar (R-MI) and George Whitesides (D-CA) have requested a ban on Chinese memories, presumably at the request of Micron, who is scared of the competition.

For now, China is even ahead of Japan, though hopefully that will change soon if the Japanese Rapidus meets its targets.

While Europe is the best in a few niche domains, it has a lot of things that cannot be done within its borders, so it is much less self-sufficient than China in electronics technology.

[ianm218]

> Nonetheless, where the price does not matter much, like for supercomputers or military technology, China can afford to match or exceed the US capabilities with their internal production

No they can’t. They are seriously compute constrained and no amount of money will close the gap in the short term. The chip export controls have been incredibly effective in that regard.

I don’t have much input on US companies buying Chinese memory but there are more bottleknecks than just memory.

[adrian_b]

Their production capacity is constrained, but not so constrained as to prevent them to demonstrate a supercomputer faster than any US supercomputer, made with custom CPUs designed and fabricated in China.

The limited production capacity means that they will not become exporters of CPUs or GPUs any time soon, but it does not mean that they cannot satisfy their internal necessities in any critical sectors. The technology that they use for CPUs and GPUs is about at the level that TSMC was 5 years ago. That may seem much, but there are a lot of people who are quite satisfied with computers older than that, and do not intend to upgrade them soon.

The main consequence of the older technology is a higher power consumption, because otherwise their designs are quite up-to-date in the attainable throughput. Therefore their datacenters must consume more energy, but that is hardly a problem in China.

The chip export controls have only forced them to design and fabricate their own CPUs and GPUs, instead of buying them from USA, and now they have become able to do this.

Without USA forcing them to do this, they might have remained dependent on imports from USA for decades, but now USA has lost the opportunity to ever play this card again. Thus USA has lost a leverage that could have been useful in a real conflict.

Such export controls are effective only for a short time, so they must be used only when there is a clear immediate goal.

[pejrich]

China can produce chips at "7nm", that's more like 8-10 years behind. My M1 macbook pro is 6 years old, and that chip was made using a "5nm" process. The advanced US chips are now on "2nm". Explain to me how China is going to produce a computer that beats US supercomputers using 10 year old technology.

[Marha01]

> is it export if they take control of the entire island manufacturing it.

If.