It's kinda bad business to fully pull out of a giant market, with a massive customer base, because of a major boom cycle in your product.

Do you know how difficult it is for a company to expand their business to new markets? Do you know difficult it is the build up a customer base in a market?

This isn't just doing addition and subtraction on n GPUs/year. This is business. We wouldn't have so many businessmen if business was that simple.

it's worse than just that. in this case it creates an even stronger incentive for a domestic chinese competitor to rise up and as soon as a chinese competitor can offer a similar product to what nvidia is offering, then nvidia's clock is already ticking. its probably too late already

It's existential for Nvidia. Jensen understood that the longer he can freely sell to China, the less opportunity/incentive there is for Chinese companies to produce their own silicon and compete head-to-head with Nvidia.

This is exactly how it played out, too, which is why Huawei chips have started taking inference workloads in China and we're now starting to see them in training too.

This was going to happen anyways no matter what the US or NVIDIA did. China has done or is doing the same thing in every industry.

If you're z.ai in 2025 with $10 million to spend on GPUs, what's better:

1) buying B100s by the palette with 15 years of stable work on CUDA, or 2) some rinky-dink Huawei chip that's 3x slower, no software framework and crashes 50% of the time?

It's a no-brainer. If there were no export controls, Nvidia would be taking all that oxygen out of the room. Chinese chip efforts would be put back by at least 5 years, and probably more like 10.

Sure, they might get there eventually but Nvidia would still have that lead when they do.

> If you're z.ai in 2025 with $10 million to spend on GPUs, what's better:

> 1) buying B100s by the palette with 15 years of stable work on CUDA, or 2) some rinky-dink Huawei chip that's 3x slower, no software framework and crashes 50% of the time?

Whichever one the CCP representative on your board tells you to do. You don't get a choice on things like this.

There's no way having the option of buying chips from Nvidia would have hurt China. You can't bait them into acting against their own interests by giving them stuff. If the harm to the domestic chip industry would really outweigh the benefits, the CCP would issue the order and no-one would buy the Nvidia chips and that would be that.

> Whichever one the CCP representative on your board tells you to do. You don't get a choice on things like this.

Clearly untrue, because many companies are using the gimped H20s and the full H200s (both legally imported or smuggled) despite official government policy being silicon-self-sufficiency. It's a bit more complex than "CCP issues order and everyone immediately falls into line".

> There's no way having the option of buying chips from Nvidia would have hurt China.

I'm not saying it "hurt China", I'm saying there's a fine line to tread between supporting Chinese AI models now, at the expense of the Chinese silicon industry in 20 years' time. The US export ban forced the issue and took the alternative off the table.

"You can't bait them into acting against their own interests by giving them stuff"

Generally this does work. China is pretty resistant to it as countries go.

See how difficult it is for the US Chip market to get off the ground, because it is so easy to just buy from other countries. A government directive to "Build It", only goes so far. So the Chinese Gov directing its companies to build chips, would have headwinds if Nvidia chips were available.

Yes it is Chinas MO. But it probably possible to influence their timing and/or degree. I do not thing they have anywhere near replaced western/Taiwan x86/ARM CPUs, for example?