Bingo! This guy gets it.

The best way of hampering China technologically has always been about keeping them completely dependent on foreign chip supply chain, e.g. ASML, TSMC, NVDA, ARM, AVGO, INTC, etc.

If you simply ban them from getting any western chips or chip tech you simply light a viciously hot fire underneath them to develop their own TSMC equivalent and their own chip designers, and we are now seeing them catching up rapidly. In fact, they are pretty close to catching up now, basically within one or two years...

Supposedly, one of those half-billion-dollar ASML EUV machines has found its way to China somehow.

The best reason to NOT ban exports is that it really doesn't work against a peer state, and China is close enough now to count. Given the significant economic trouble in the PRC (youth unemployment, unwinding the property bubble, overproduction of EVs) the US could definitely have played this better instead of creating a vibrant full-stack domestic AI sector in China.

Still, it’s not like an off the shelf product with an 2 pager quick installation and first steps manual. Training, and maintenance, and repairs, and configuration,… I doubt you can simply ask your friendly neighbourhood LLM

How would they obtain one? These kids of industrial machines come in pieces and need to be assembled, commissioned and maintained by OEM personnel. The only thing I can think of is ASML sold a machine to a compromised company who secretly shipped it to China without ASML knowing.

He is probably referring to this : https://www.reuters.com/world/china/how-china-built-its-manh...

They hired old asml employees.

> vibrant full-stack domestic AI sector in China

This has crashed, check the markets.

This would work in a fully capitalist economy where supplying them with chips would remove funding/investment from the local alternatives. This is not China. China has been and will continue to pour billions upon billions of dollars into their native industry because they too believe that having their own chips is important, so they will take all the cutting edge chips they can get and they will continue to develop their own at the exact same rate.

They do not need a ban to light a fire under them. The fire is already lit and burning and nothing the west can do will even slightly dampen it.

You yourself claim they are within a couple of years. If that's the case you think they will stop developing if we sell them chips? That's laughable.

IMO that ignores the decades of investment the Chinese government has made in its semiconductor industry. It’s literally been written into their five year plans at the highest level with tons of government pressure to buy domestic when possible across industries. With the biggest captive consumer market on the planet, there is no universe in which China doesn’t get its own cutting edge chip industry. They have been determined to do it since at least the 90s and have invested hundreds of billions in a concerted effort to pull it off.

I'm doubtful of this hypothesis. Maybe for a few years, sure. But China has proven time and again that they do not need foreign supply constraints to incentivize the growth of their own competing domestic industry.

The fundamental contradiction of the AI maximalists like Huang is claiming that AI does not need regulated while simultaneously supporting chip exports to China. The supporting claim for the former is that we need to compete on AI with China and move as fast as possible and every day matters, while the latter implies that slowing down their compute is inconsequential.

One can have good argumenta against a specific law (personally I am very much pro free trade), but as long as the law exist, breaking it comes with consequences.

Yeah, Jensen sees the whole hw/sw ecosystem as a package. It isn't just chip n+1 on process n-1.

Keeping adversaries X-behind discourages adversaries from developing a new ecosystem since X-behind is better than building new. If an adversary with tremendous resources must recreate the ecosystem, it will be adopted by US+global companies since it will be lower margin.

Your argument is that it's actually good to break the law?

Some people argue that it is indeed a moral responsibility to break an unjust law.

I'm not sure if this is true or false, but as an observation: this is the exact opposite reasoning people use to criticize isolationism and market protection.

You are essentially arguing that CEOs can violate US laws if it makes them personally richer. That is litterally the crime.

If this was the case, the Chinese government would have placed import restrictions on US chip manufacturers. Currently Chinese AI companies are constrained on compute. This is why they go to such great lengths to use Singaporean straw purchasers of NVIDIA cards. Merely having strong market incentives to succeed is not enough. Sustained, time-consuming R&D and technology sharing is necessary to catch up to competitors.

If this principle were true, then autarchies like North Korea would be the most advantaged since they never have to worry about international competition in their domestic market.

Your confidence is not backed by any data or observation, it's just an unfounded inference.

> "If this was the case, the Chinese government would have placed import restrictions on US chip manufacturers."

I do not know full details, but China did exactly that. There were articles about limiting Nvidia chip imports more than a year ago. It really highlighted the absurdity of the export ban.

To my non-expert knowledge, the reasoning behind the export ban has never been explained beyond a vague assertion that China would do some sort of evil with AI if they have bigger GPUs than some arbitrary number of transistors, and also some silliness where paying a 15% tax made some of the GPUs safe to export. It has been pretty great for Huawei.

> If this was the case, the Chinese government would have placed import restrictions on US chip manufacturers.

There are. A lot of Nvidia chips are still stuck in Hong Kong.

What the government does is not always what corporations follow.

You mean the exact thing China has been doing?

https://nationaltechnology.co.uk/Nvidia_GPUs_Sitting_Unused_...

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/u-s-commerce-secr...

[delayed]

You say this, but there is already massive scarcity in the domestic market for any 16GB+ GPU. We can't get enough and it's bottle-necking scale out. Even if Nvidia diverted their entire supply to China there would still be a global shortage and an economic case for Chinese companies to build chips.

The Chinese chip market is exactly like any other market in any other country, except it's run by the largest and arguably most successful autocratic organization in the world, one which views reducing reliance on external suppliers who can turn the taps on and off at will/whim, to be of existential importance. I mean, aside from them being autocratic despots and control freaks, I can't even blame them. Your main adversary's president (and we all know how high-quality they always are) can wake up any day and decide you don't get to buy a critical part of the AI tech stack, good luck with all your future endeavours!

Yeah, no. No one in Beijing will let Nvidia or the White House have that kind of power in the long run because the free market knows best and golly gee where will we get the money and whatnot. They will buy whatever they can to bridge the gap to a time when they own their own tap.