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This restriction makes no sense. The US says "18 countries may purchase our AI chips", but what I understand is "90% of the world may purchase Chinese AI chips

This restriction makes no sense. The US says "18 countries may purchase our AI chips", but what I understand is "90% of the world may purchase Chinese AI chips". China just needs to infiltrate Taiwan, which is geographically and culturally closer than the US.

sofixa 2y ago
> China just needs to infiltrate Taiwan, which is geographically and culturally closer than the US. Taiwan is China. Their official name is the Republic of China, and they're the remnants of the losers from the civil war that ran away go to an island and assimilated the locals. They still officially claim to be "the one and only real" China. For Americans, think it the Confederation ran away to Puerto Rico (assuming it used to be American before being occupied by Spain for a few years, before they went there) and was still there. But today Taiwan is de facto independent. More and more of its people consider themselves Taiwanese, not "the real" China. Ideally, they should be left to self-determinate. Unfortunately China (PRC) considers itself to be the one and only real China too, and wants all of it. And it would consider Taiwan, with which it has a lot of bad blood (its former dictator literally preferred fighting the Communists over defending over the Japanese that were invading and committing mass atrocities; and he started all that with multiple purges of anyone left aligned), becoming "independent"/separate as a big humiliation. But they also know that any war will probably result in TSMC being sabotaged, so it might be all for nothing, economically. The question is will they risk it for "prestige".
- genewitch 2y ago
  Are the machines German or am I misremembering? The ones in the video were maybe 14nm and I vaguely recall the machines being manufactured in Germany and flown and assembled for TSMC. I know, for example, that Motorola and Texas instruments know how to fab, and a dire shortage would be things like 680x0 and 6502 and 386 (see intel quark for the state of 386/486 processors a decade ago...) And ideally there'd be national RISC-V chips or something idk let's keep it fun.
  - sneak 2y ago
    Dutch. ASML is in the Netherlands.
    - genewitch 2y ago
      Oof, my dad would never let me hear the end of it.
  - sofixa 2y ago
    The machines are Dutch, but there's more to it than just the machines (or we'd have cutting edge fabs in Germany, France, US, China, South Korea, and all around).
  - madspindel 2y ago
    They are Dutch and insanely advanced and complex machines https://youtu.be/h_zgURwr6nA?feature=shared https://youtu.be/h_zgURwr6nA?feature=shared
- tgv 2y ago
  The bad blood is mutual. Mao's armies stood aside while the NRA tried to hold off the Japanese, with the sole intention of weakening the NRA. They could have prevented several blood baths.
  - DiogenesKynikos 2y ago
    That's a strange reversal of history. Chiang Kai-Shek's policy was to prioritize the fight against the Communists over the fight against the Japanese. He only agreed to a united front with the Communists against Japan after he was kidnapped by some of his own generals, who forced him to talk with the Communists.[0] 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi%27an_Incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi%27an_Incident
  - sofixa 2y ago
    No. As the sibling comment points out, Chiang ignored the Japanese invasion until he was forced by his generals to take action. After that the much smaller Communist forces (diminished after multiple purges and military campaigns by Chiang's Nationalists) fought a guerilla war against Japan, which is the only thing they could do with the forces at their disposal. Meanwhile Chiang had a proper army, and as such fought proper battles against the Japanese.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- dathinab 2y ago
  > Taiwan is China. This is a sever case of word nit-picking and misinterpretation. When (western) people say China they mean "China (PRC)" _never_ Taiwan and pretending they don't isn't helping anyone. And just because two countries have the same root in a civil war of a past now gone country which both claim to succeed doesn't mean they are the same country. Nor is today's China the same country as idk. China during the Ming dynasty. Yes they are political successor, yes they use the same name, but no they aren't politically the same country if we really nit-pick. I mean if they where then we also would need to treat Austia and Hungary as the same country. Or say the BRD (i.e. today's Germany) is the same country as the 3rd Reich, Weimar Repulic and the Holy Roman Empire of German Nation. They are all predecessors of Germany, Germany has to take responsibility for some of it's past predecessors, too. But they aren't the same country from a political nit-picking POV. Same for Russia and the UDSSR etc. etc. And yes it's complicated as both countries still claim sovereignty over the territory of each other. But for Taiwan that is ironically more to appease China, i.e. dropping that claim would signal Taiwan trying to finally fully break away from China (PCR) which China would never allow.
genewitch 2y ago
Per HN guidelines, that "just" is load bearing.
cookiemonsieur 2y ago
It doesn't even matter at this point. As evidenced by DeepSeek. A growing portion of the world is distancing themselves from the west, and It's a good thing. People should have the ability to choose who they do business with without a third party strongarming them.
- cocoggu 2y ago
  Can you please explain to me why AI chips don't matters anymore because of DeepSeek? I thought it was just a better model, but perhaps I didn't get it?
  - Gigachad 2y ago
    Deepseek used older generation chips and developed a model that takes significantly less compute. Making having access to tons of the latest nvidia hardware unnecessary.
    - Cumpiler69 2y ago
      Being forced to live with more HW restrictions usually results in more reliance on SW creativity and better optimizations instead of lazy developers bloating SW to fill all available resources. Just like how it's no surprise that websites developed where everyone has the latest and grates fully loaded M silicon MacBooks also sufferer from horrible lack of optimizations because "it works on my machine" while being a stuttery mess everywhere else.
      - Gigachad 2y ago
        Yeah, seen the same with PC gaming. Minimum specs absolutely exploding for no real reason other than the fact most gamers were buying the latest top tier cards. Then the Steam Deck came out and devs are forced to consider the fact that a 2D pixel art game shouldn't be lagging out on a SoC capable of producing stunning 3D graphics in a properly optimized game.
        2y ago
nisten 2y ago
It makes perfect sense if they're laundering Russian assets to circumvent US Sanctions.
iforgot22 2y ago
Isn't this going to erode Nvidia's CUDA advantage? I thought that was way more important than their hardware.
- iforgot22 2y ago
  Well seems Deepseek still used CUDA at least
jjallen 2y ago
What does Taiwan have to do with this? Because it’s a US ally China could get GPUs through Taiwan if china invaded Taiwan? Maybe old ones if this is what you are saying.
- Aldo_MX 2y ago
  I said "infiltrate" as in "send their best engineers as undercover agents to work at TSMC".
- dathinab 2y ago
  Most bleeding edge chip manufacturing is currently done in Taiwan, Taiwan has both the machinery and know how to produce state of the art AI training chips. And while they are not quite at NVIDIAs knowledge about chip design by far the largest source of performance differences between NVIDIA and China based completion is the manufacturing not the design (which still is better, but not to the margin where it's not something you can somewhat "good enough" bridge by "throwing more money and (electric)power at it", for the manufacturing differences on the other hand "throwing money/(electric)power at it" to bridge the gap isn't viable. The difference is to big.). Through then if we are realistic both Taiwan and the US did take measurements to make sure the even if China attacks Taiwan and wins they aren't getting their hands on this tech. Except Taiwan would have been not very clever if they didn't try to find ways to work around this, so that they are a lever to negotiate in case the US abandons them... (it's unclear if they did find ways tho).

sofixa 2y ago

> China just needs to infiltrate Taiwan, which is geographically and culturally closer than the US. Taiwan is China. Their official name is the Republic of China, and they're the remnants of the losers from the civil war that ran away go to an island and assimilated the locals. They still officially claim to be "the one and only real" China. For Americans, think it the Confederation ran away to Puerto Rico (assuming it used to be American before being occupied by Spain for a few years, before they went there) and was still there. But today Taiwan is de facto independent. More and more of its people consider themselves Taiwanese, not "the real" China. Ideally, they should be left to self-determinate. Unfortunately China (PRC) considers itself to be the one and only real China too, and wants all of it. And it would consider Taiwan, with which it has a lot of bad blood (its former dictator literally preferred fighting the Communists over defending over the Japanese that were invading and committing mass atrocities; and he started all that with multiple purges of anyone left aligned), becoming "independent"/separate as a big humiliation. But they also know that any war will probably result in TSMC being sabotaged, so it might be all for nothing, economically. The question is will they risk it for "prestige".

genewitch 2y ago
Are the machines German or am I misremembering? The ones in the video were maybe 14nm and I vaguely recall the machines being manufactured in Germany and flown and assembled for TSMC. I know, for example, that Motorola and Texas instruments know how to fab, and a dire shortage would be things like 680x0 and 6502 and 386 (see intel quark for the state of 386/486 processors a decade ago...) And ideally there'd be national RISC-V chips or something idk let's keep it fun.
- sneak 2y ago
  Dutch. ASML is in the Netherlands.
  - genewitch 2y ago
    Oof, my dad would never let me hear the end of it.
- sofixa 2y ago
  The machines are Dutch, but there's more to it than just the machines (or we'd have cutting edge fabs in Germany, France, US, China, South Korea, and all around).
- madspindel 2y ago
  They are Dutch and insanely advanced and complex machines https://youtu.be/h_zgURwr6nA?feature=shared https://youtu.be/h_zgURwr6nA?feature=shared
tgv 2y ago
The bad blood is mutual. Mao's armies stood aside while the NRA tried to hold off the Japanese, with the sole intention of weakening the NRA. They could have prevented several blood baths.
- DiogenesKynikos 2y ago
  That's a strange reversal of history. Chiang Kai-Shek's policy was to prioritize the fight against the Communists over the fight against the Japanese. He only agreed to a united front with the Communists against Japan after he was kidnapped by some of his own generals, who forced him to talk with the Communists.[0] 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi%27an_Incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi%27an_Incident
- sofixa 2y ago
  No. As the sibling comment points out, Chiang ignored the Japanese invasion until he was forced by his generals to take action. After that the much smaller Communist forces (diminished after multiple purges and military campaigns by Chiang's Nationalists) fought a guerilla war against Japan, which is the only thing they could do with the forces at their disposal. Meanwhile Chiang had a proper army, and as such fought proper battles against the Japanese.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
dathinab 2y ago
> Taiwan is China. This is a sever case of word nit-picking and misinterpretation. When (western) people say China they mean "China (PRC)" _never_ Taiwan and pretending they don't isn't helping anyone. And just because two countries have the same root in a civil war of a past now gone country which both claim to succeed doesn't mean they are the same country. Nor is today's China the same country as idk. China during the Ming dynasty. Yes they are political successor, yes they use the same name, but no they aren't politically the same country if we really nit-pick. I mean if they where then we also would need to treat Austia and Hungary as the same country. Or say the BRD (i.e. today's Germany) is the same country as the 3rd Reich, Weimar Repulic and the Holy Roman Empire of German Nation. They are all predecessors of Germany, Germany has to take responsibility for some of it's past predecessors, too. But they aren't the same country from a political nit-picking POV. Same for Russia and the UDSSR etc. etc. And yes it's complicated as both countries still claim sovereignty over the territory of each other. But for Taiwan that is ironically more to appease China, i.e. dropping that claim would signal Taiwan trying to finally fully break away from China (PCR) which China would never allow.

genewitch 2y ago

Per HN guidelines, that "just" is load bearing.

cookiemonsieur 2y ago

It doesn't even matter at this point. As evidenced by DeepSeek. A growing portion of the world is distancing themselves from the west, and It's a good thing. People should have the ability to choose who they do business with without a third party strongarming them.

cocoggu 2y ago
Can you please explain to me why AI chips don't matters anymore because of DeepSeek? I thought it was just a better model, but perhaps I didn't get it?
- Gigachad 2y ago
  Deepseek used older generation chips and developed a model that takes significantly less compute. Making having access to tons of the latest nvidia hardware unnecessary.
  - Cumpiler69 2y ago
    Being forced to live with more HW restrictions usually results in more reliance on SW creativity and better optimizations instead of lazy developers bloating SW to fill all available resources. Just like how it's no surprise that websites developed where everyone has the latest and grates fully loaded M silicon MacBooks also sufferer from horrible lack of optimizations because "it works on my machine" while being a stuttery mess everywhere else.
    - Gigachad 2y ago
      Yeah, seen the same with PC gaming. Minimum specs absolutely exploding for no real reason other than the fact most gamers were buying the latest top tier cards. Then the Steam Deck came out and devs are forced to consider the fact that a 2D pixel art game shouldn't be lagging out on a SoC capable of producing stunning 3D graphics in a properly optimized game.
      - 2y ago

nisten 2y ago

It makes perfect sense if they're laundering Russian assets to circumvent US Sanctions.

iforgot22 2y ago

Isn't this going to erode Nvidia's CUDA advantage? I thought that was way more important than their hardware.

iforgot22 2y ago
Well seems Deepseek still used CUDA at least

jjallen 2y ago

What does Taiwan have to do with this? Because it’s a US ally China could get GPUs through Taiwan if china invaded Taiwan? Maybe old ones if this is what you are saying.

Aldo_MX 2y ago
I said "infiltrate" as in "send their best engineers as undercover agents to work at TSMC".
dathinab 2y ago
Most bleeding edge chip manufacturing is currently done in Taiwan, Taiwan has both the machinery and know how to produce state of the art AI training chips. And while they are not quite at NVIDIAs knowledge about chip design by far the largest source of performance differences between NVIDIA and China based completion is the manufacturing not the design (which still is better, but not to the margin where it's not something you can somewhat "good enough" bridge by "throwing more money and (electric)power at it", for the manufacturing differences on the other hand "throwing money/(electric)power at it" to bridge the gap isn't viable. The difference is to big.). Through then if we are realistic both Taiwan and the US did take measurements to make sure the even if China attacks Taiwan and wins they aren't getting their hands on this tech. Except Taiwan would have been not very clever if they didn't try to find ways to work around this, so that they are a lever to negotiate in case the US abandons them... (it's unclear if they did find ways tho).