Manufacturing is the hard part. China certainly has the knowledge to build a TPU architecture without needing to steal the plans. What they don't have is the ability to actually build the chips. This is even in spite of also stealing lithography plans.

There is a dark art to semiconductor manufacturing that pretty much only TSMC really has the wizards for. Maybe intel and samsung a bit too.

Lot of retired fab folks in the Austin area if you needed to spin up a local fab. It's really not a dark art, there are plenty of folks that have experience in the industry.

This is sort of like saying there are lots of kids in the local community college shop class if you want to spin up an F1 team.

The knowledge of making 2008 era chips is not a gating factor for getting a handful of atoms to function as a transistor in current SOTA chips. There are probably 100 people on earth who know how to do this, and the majority of them are in Taiwan.

Again, China has literally stolen the plans for EUV lithography, years ago, and still cannot get it to work. Even Samsung and Intel, using the same machines as TSMC, cannot match what they are doing.

It's a dark art in the most literal sense.

Nevermind that new these cutting edge fabs cost ~$50 Billion each.

I've always wondered. If you have fuck you money, wouldn't it be possible to build GPUs to do LLM matmul with 2008 technology. Again, assuming energy costs / cooling costs don't matter.

IIRC people have gotten LLMs to run on '80s hardware. Inference isn't overly compute heavy.

The killer really is training, which is insanely compute intensive and really only recently hardware practical on the scale needed.

you could probably train a gpt 2 sized model with sota architecture on a 2008 supercomputer. it would take a while though.

Energy, cooling, and how much of the building you're taking up do matter. They matter less and in a more manageable way for hyperscalers that have a long established resource management practice in lots of big data centers because they can phase in new technologies as they phase out the old. But it's a lot more daunting to think about building a data center big enough to compete with one full of Blackwell systems there are more than 10 times more performant per watt and per square foot.

Building the clean rooms at this scale is a limitation in itself. Just getting the factory setup to and the machines put in so they don't generate particulate matter in operation is an art that compares in difficulty to making the chips themselves.

The mask shops at TSMC and Samsung kind of are a dark art. It's one of the interesting things about the contract manufacturing business in chips. It's not just a matter of having access to state of the art equipment.

For China there is no plan B for semiconductor manufacturing. Invading Taiwan would be a dice roll and the consequences would be severe. They will create their own SOTA semiconductor industry. Same goes for their military.

The question is when? Does that come in time to deflate the US tech stock bubble? Or will the bubble start to level out and reality catch up, or will the market crash for another reason beforehand?

China has their own fabs. They are behind TSMC in terms of technology, but that doesn't mean they don't have fabs. They're currently ~7nm AFAIK. That's behind TSMC, but also not useless. They are obviously trying hard to catch up. I don't think we should just imagine that they never will. China has a lot of smart engineers and they know how strategically important chip manufacturing is.

This is like this funny idea people had in the early 2000s that China would continue to manufacture most US technology but they could never design their own competitive tech. Why would anyone think that?

Wrt invading Taiwan, I don't think there is any way China can get TSMC intact. If they do invade Taiwan (please God no), it would be a horrible bloodbath. Deaths in the hundreds of thousands and probably relentless bombing. Taiwan would likely destroy its own fabs to avoid them being taken. It would be sad and horrible.

If they invade Taiwan, we will scuttle the plants and direct ASML to disable their machines which they will do because that’s the condition under which we gave them the tech. They’re not going to get it this way.

They’ll just catch the next wave of tech or eventually break into EUV.

imo the most likely answer is that asml funds a second source for the optics that isn't US controlled and starts shipping to China. The US is losing influence fast.

We’re not above stuxnetting them if it comes to it. They operate at the pleasure of the US with US tech.

It would likely take ASML decades to develop an alternative EUV light source not encumbered by US defense technology, at which time it may not matter.

Everyone is still dependent on a single American manufacturer for this tech after decades of development. This strongly suggests that it is considerably more difficult than just "funding a second source".

> Wrt invading Taiwan, I don't think there is any way China can get TSMC intact.

There are so many trade and manufacturing links between China and Taiwan that an outright war would be economically disastrous for both countries.

That doesn't mean they won't try anyway; political ideology often trumps rational planning.

> Why would anyone think that?

That'd be the belief in good old American exceptionalism. Up until recently, a common meme on HN was "freedom" is fundamental to innovation, and naturally the country with the most Freedom(TM) wins. This even persisted after it was clear that DJI was kicking all kinds of ass, outcompeting multiple western drone companies.

It's probably true that free enterprise helps a lot, but China has that in large part. Even though the CCP calls itself communist, China is very capitalist in a number of ways. But I guess China is showing us that capitalism can exist without democracy.

> capitalism can exist without democracy.

It's not exactly a new idea. This was the CIA's operating principle in the western hemisphere since before the cold war.

The software is the hard part. Western software still outclasses what the chinese produce by a good amount.

This. The amount of investment into CUDA is high enough most companies won't even consider competition, even if it was lower cost.

We desperately need more open frameworks for competition to work

> What they don't have is the ability to actually build the chips.

China has fabs. Most are older nodes and are used to manufacture chips used in cars and consumer electronics. They have companies that design chips (manufactured by TSMC), like the Ascend 910, which are purpose built for AI. They may be behind, but they’re not standing still.

>Combine it with China's nuclear base and labor pool. And the cherry on top, America will train 600k Chinese students as Trump agreed to.

I dont understand this part. What has nuclear base got to do with chip manufacturing? And surely, not all 600k students are learning chip design or stealing plans

I assume the nuclear reactors are to power the data centers using the new chips. There have been a few mentions on HN about the US being very behind in building enough power plants to run LLM workloads

We should ask ourselves: is it worth ruining local communities in order to beat China in the global sphere?

That question was asked and answered years ago and the answer is YES (not me personally, but the people in charge)

There are things about China not to be celebrated but one cannot help but admire the way that they invest in their country as a whole. The US is all about "what's in it for me".

Fortunately, we have environmentalists who can protect us from a future of towering nuclear plants and wind turbines with hills covered in solar panels.

Is all that construction really worth it when we could be protecting neighborhoods and historic views?

That's absolutely a fair dig but it's far more complex than that. Our whole manufacturing base being outsourced is on the corporations who chose that "cost-cutting" path.

And it's not an entirely binary choice on protecting neighborhoods and views; for example what's happening in south Memphis with the power plant that's powering the Grok center there is a classic case of environmental racism -- they are cutting costs on pollution regulation because they have a community that they can dump the externalized costs on via their emissions.

Nobody's saying Grok shouldn't have the power, it's just a small detail on how that impact is managed.

I don’t think anyone is convinced that if the small detail were managed that there wouldn’t be another God of the Gaps small detail.

The frenetic pace of data center construction in the US means that nuclear is not a short-term option. No way are they going to wait a decade or more for generation to come on line. It’s going to be solar, batteries, and gas (turbines, and possibly fuel cells).

Thankfully LLMs are a dead end, so nobody will make it to AGI by just throwing more electricity at the problem. Now if we could only have a new AI winter we could postpone the end of mankind as the dominant species on earth by another couple of decades.

Nuclear power is what they are talking about, not weapons.

I mean they have the power grid to run TPUs at 10x the scale of USA.

About students, have you seen the microelectronic labs in American universities lately? A huge chunk are Chinese already. Same with some of the top AI labs.

The current narrative is that we are out of power so we must shut down power projects that are not politically prioritized, and build nuclear and coal capacity, which is.

>It could be a deadly blow for Google, NVIDIA, and the rest.

How would this be a deadly blow to Google? Google makes TPUs for their own services and products, avoiding paying the expensive nvidia tax. If other people make similar products, this has effectively zero impact on Google.

nvidia knew their days were numbered, at least in their ownership of the whole market. And China hardly had to steal the great plans for a TPU to make one, and a FMA/MAC unit is actually a surprisingly simple bit of hardware to design. Everyone is adding "TPUs" in their chips - Apple, Qualcomm, Google, AMD, Amazon, Huawei, nvidia (that's what tensor cores are) and everyone else.

And that startup isn't the big secret. Huawei already has solutions matching the H20. Once the specific need that can be serviced by an ASIC is clear, everyone starts building it.

>America will train 600k Chinese students as Trump agreed to

What great advantage do you think this is?

America isn't remotely the great gatekeeper on this. If anything, Taiwan + the Netherlands (ASML) are. China would yield infinitely more value in learning manufacturing and fabrication secrets than cloning some specific ASIC.

Yeah I'm terrified that TPUs will get cheaper, that would be awful.

Half the article was about the extensive software codependency between TPU's, Borb, lilpunet, their optical switching network, etc. How much of that is manufacturing and not just software and engineering experience, which won't be so easy to copy?