US Officials Order Nvidia To Halt Sales of Top AI Chips To China (reuters.com) 65
Chip designer Nvidia on Wednesday said that U.S. officials told it to stop exporting two top computing chips for artificial intelligence work to China, a move that could cripple Chinese firms' ability to carry out advanced work like image recognition and hamper a business Nvidia expects to generate $400 million in sales this quarter. Reuters reports: Nvidia shares fell 4% after hours. The company said the ban, which affects its A100 and H100 chips designed to speed up machine learning tasks, could interfere with completion of developing the H100, the flagship chip Nvidia announced this year. Nvidia said U.S. officials told it the new rule "will address the risk that the covered products may be used in, or diverted to, a "military end use" or "military end user" in China."
The announcement signals a major escalation of the U.S. crackdown on China's technological capabilities as tensions bubble over the fate of Taiwan, where chips for Nvidia and almost every other major chip firm are manufactured. [...] Nvidia said it had booked $400 million in sales of the affected chips this quarter to China that could be lost if Chinese firms decide not to buy alternative Nvidia products. It said it plans to apply for exemptions to the rule but has "no assurances" that U.S. officials will grant them. Stacy Rasgon, a financial analyst with Bernstein, said the disclosure signaled that about 10% of Nvidia's data center sales, which investors have closely monitored in recent years, were coming from China and that the hit to sales was likely "manageable" for Nvidia.
The announcement signals a major escalation of the U.S. crackdown on China's technological capabilities as tensions bubble over the fate of Taiwan, where chips for Nvidia and almost every other major chip firm are manufactured. [...] Nvidia said it had booked $400 million in sales of the affected chips this quarter to China that could be lost if Chinese firms decide not to buy alternative Nvidia products. It said it plans to apply for exemptions to the rule but has "no assurances" that U.S. officials will grant them. Stacy Rasgon, a financial analyst with Bernstein, said the disclosure signaled that about 10% of Nvidia's data center sales, which investors have closely monitored in recent years, were coming from China and that the hit to sales was likely "manageable" for Nvidia.
Meh (Score:4, Insightful)
China already produces their own AI chips, particularly SoC. Rather than "crippling" China, this will likely just incentivize increased hardware investment and/or IP theft. We'll see I guess.
Re:Meh (Score:5, Informative)
Well, we can't have it both ways. Either China is good or China is bad.
Unless - gasp - some Chinese are good-ish and some Chinese are bad-ish. Just like all other human beings everywhere.
Mind you, much depends on your definitions of "good" and "bad". For the US government and its controllers, "good" is anything that maintains or extends their power, wealth, and control. "Bad" is anyone or anything that obstructs those things.
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"good" is anything that maintains or extends their power, wealth, and control. "Bad" is anyone or anything that obstructs those things.
Facile and biased. Generally speaking the US regards "bad" as conquering democratic countries to annex their land. In that respect China and Russia are demonstrably "bad."
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This childish view of geopolitics accidentally reveals the nuance that conquering democratic countries for reasons other than annexation is just fine. I like it.
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Name a country the US has conquered. Afghanistan? Left. Iraq? Left. Panama? Left.
The US hasn't annexed any other countries since 1947, but we didn't leave the countries you list because we are "good guys." We left Afghanistan and Iraq because we lost the wars. We left Panama because we set up a compliant regime that would do what we wanted.
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Northern Mexico. The Indian Territories. Hawaii. Puerto Rico. The Philippines.
But post WWII the US does't really "conquer" so much as it overthrows governments of any description that disagree wth it, plunging the associated countries into poverty, chaos and typically some sort of dystopian dictator who fills the power vacuum. Much better.
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Listing examples where the US conquered democracies without annexing them does more to prove my point than disprove it.
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Point of order: China has not conquered a democratic country post-WW2....
Do supercomputers still matter? (Score:2)
Feeding a troll and propagating a null Subject?
My actual reaction to the story is to wonder if China is still relying on any external source for any "strategically significant" good or service. I'd check the supercomputers website, but I'm pretty sure the biggest machines dropped off the list years ago...
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They produce AI Chips? Or SoC? Both? Which ones?
They might have current generation chips from Nvidia, but by not selling them any more of the current generation, they'll lose any ability to develop their next generation platforms. The next generation AI chips (Which Nvidia designed 5 years ago and are about to go into production) they won't have access to. Leaving them falling behind.
Without the AI chips, they'll have major issues designing a lot of things, especially future SoC, CPUs and GPUs. They'll also
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You don't need AI enabled GPU's to design chips. In fact, none other than a small group at Google uses AI algorithms for chip design and that's still a fairly new practice with somewhat mixed results at the high-end.
Re:Meh (Score:4, Insightful)
I can see this actually incentivizing US companies because they no longer can rest on their laurels, making easy money by selling iterative improvements to China. They'll have to surpass themselves and expand Western markets with exceedingly powerful technology because there is no easy money.
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China will have to waste time stealing and reverse engineering old tech while the US would have moved on to new tech in that time.
Yeah, they have to steal because there's no way they could develop any of their own.
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China's rapid development in all things computing is because they have been able to piggyback off bought and stolen IP. Without that massive leg up, they have to climb from further down the progress ladder than they have to.
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Why do you think they've been trying to hire scientists away from Taiwan?
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Depends who you ask. Some people think China is ahead.
https://www.reuters.com/techno... [reuters.com]
Part of the reason is that Chinese companies are not so restrained when it comes to deploying AI. Even the US has some laws protecting people from AI, e.g. race and gender detection with the intent to discriminate.
Another reason is that Chinese companies are throwing a lot of money at AI R&D. While cutting them off from these chips gives them fewer options for heavy AI workloads, they still have options. It also boos
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China remains quite behind in terms of hardware.
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China remains quite behind in terms of hardware.
China is behind but making rapid progress. SMIC [wikipedia.org] is prototyping 7 nm chips.
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If you limit the IP transfer to China, then their progress will slow.
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At the present moment, the US is still ahead, and this allows the US to maintain an advantage because China will have to waste time stealing and reverse engineering old tech while the US would have moved on to new tech in that time.
Unless it turns out that China finds entirely new directions for R&D, and heads the US corporations off at the pass. From memory, China graduates more than 10 times as many STEM specialists as the USA every year, and the best of them are amazingly good.
Until you grasp that the great majority of all technical innovations throughout history originated in China, you will find such discussions trying.
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From memory, China graduates more than 10 times as many STEM specialists as the USA every year, and the best of them are amazingly good.
There's also a lot of cheating weighing them down, and the cheaters are very good at playing the system to keep themselves in cozy positions instead of pushing things forward.
Until you grasp that the great majority of all technical innovations throughout history originated in China
Yes. Right now, it is the Chinese in Taiwan that is innovating heaviliy in the silicon space. China has been trying to lure their scientists to no effect.
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China already produces their own AI chips, particularly SoC.
And if they were as good as nvidia's chips, they wouldn't buy chips from nvidia, because they would be saving money. QED, they are not.
Re:Meh (Score:4, Insightful)
They might be as good, just not available. For example, Alibaba have their own AI chips, but don't sell them to anyone else.
Taiwan is probably not thrilled about this. Gives China more justification to invade. Some rubbish like "lifting the illegal US blockade".
Good. (Score:2)
And the CCP can't blame the US government for intervening because they don't like the deal.
Industrial espionage is an entirely different thing.
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And the CCP can't blame the US government for intervening because they don't like the deal.
Although they might find such behaviour inconsistent coming from the world's leading evangelists of "the open market" and "free competition".
The American way is "free competition when that favours us, and state intervention when that favours us". (Failing which, outright bombardment, invasion, and overthrow of governments).
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Just because you promote free trade doesn't mean you do free trade with everyone. The whole point of promoting free trade is that all parties engage in free trade. Not some one-way relationship.
China might resort to what PC gamers did (Score:2)
During the chip shortage when it seemed only scalpers got cards, some of us, who were due for a system upgrade anyway, bought new PCs from places like CyberPower, because Nvidia and AMD knew that allocating cards to system builders caused a lot of scalpers to think twice before buying high end PCs just to part them out.
I kid (different chips right?), although I do remember way back when the CCCP was found to be buying arcade gaming consoles just for the microprocessors. IIRC their scientists were told to co
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IIRC their scientists were told to company the chips exactly, with no attempts at improving them, which led to American intelligence discovering that even markings that were akin to "signatures" had been copied by them.
E.g. "VAX: for those who care enough to steal only the best".
BIREN (Score:2)
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I'm sure it will be a success just like Longsoon, where they need twice as many servers to get the same performance with foreign processors.
Sigh (Score:2)
Came out with the opposite meaning there, I meant the same performance as with foreign processors. Let this be a lesson to you, kids. Use preview.
Re: BIREN (Score:1)
China doesnâ(TM)t care that it needs twice as many resources, theyâ(TM)re not constrained by the predictions of climate models 300 years from now, theyâ(TM)ll just burn coal and enslave people to get to their goals.
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For some time now, China has had enormous leverage over the USA. From providing most of its citizens with consumer goods they can afford, for instance.
Of course, the Chinese are stuck with tons of worthless American paper which they got in return. But now they can afford to burn that paper, or use it for the other traditional purpose - and the only risk to them would be falling debris from the ruin of the USA.
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I'd argue that the USA has enormous leverage over China by buying their cheap consumer goods to keep their factories going and people employed. China has failed to develop a consumer orientated middle class that can purchase these goods and with current problems in the real estate market the Chinese won't be spending as much.
Closing the barn door after the horse? (Score:2)
I could be wrong but this kinda seems like they are trying to close the barn door after the horse already bolted. Don't they already have a glut of Nvidia's cards because of crypto miners jumping ship? I do however recognize that this could help further down the road BUT I think they will have developed their own specialized chips by then. If this is really their concern then they should also be banning Google's Tensor processors from being sold to China.
Honestly, this move reeks of desperation to slow do
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> Honestly, this move reeks of desperation to slow down Chinese AI development.
Yeah, that's the stated goal. I don't think anyone would disagree the US wants to remain ahead of China in this area. The question is - will it work?
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by "them" what are you referring to?
If you look at the autonomous taxi that went live in ShenZhen china, you'll see China is already ahead of Tesla. The videos show the autonomous taxi handling crazy traffic. Based on videos of the latest Autopilot betas on youtube, 60-70% situations in ShenZhen would classified as "edge cases" by autopilot. Anyone paying attention would realize China is already ahead in some areas and unlike the US Federal government doesn't suffer from decision paralysis. Look at how much
this cruel trade (Score:2)
We should not be exporting these AI chimps at all. I wonder how well they are cared for in the dungeons of Google and Amazon.
LIkely only a minor delay... (Score:2)
With the tendency of the Chinese government to look the other way when folks claim intellectual property rights, I assume that this is only going to be a minor delay till the chips are reverse-engineered/ cloned in-country....
I mean sure, preventing the sales to China will at least ensure that there are supplies available for domestic consumption - but it just seems like when it comes to information - any nation state who wants to is going to find a way to get hold of it and reverse-engineer / clone it
and when the USA says china can't own anything in? (Score:2)
and when the USA says china can't own anything in the usa?
say they can't make any intellectual property rights / patent clams in the usa?
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Pelosi saves a cool $600,000 by selling in time! (Score:2)
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Nationalism is stupid. (Score:2)
I understand that humanity will not evolve in my lifetime, but we should at least all agree on the goals of global peace and cooperation.
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There used to be some change of popular overthrow of despots, dictators, and authoritarian parties. The information age is changing the balance and creating these highly stable systems that one day might never face a successful revolt. Maybe I've been reading too much of Asimov's Foundation series, but we could be heading down a future with hundreds of years of oppression. Honestly if technology isn't going to release us and make us free we should fucking dump it now and start over.
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The root cause is how we select our leaders and corruption, i.e. taking public property for personal gain.
In the US, donating money to a campaign currently is considered free speech and is protected by the US constitution. Unfortunately the Citizen's United decision that supports this idea has caused massive amounts of money from huge multinational businesses and foreign governments to flood our political system without transparency. Our leaders spend more
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In a one party system the party selects the leaders and the people don't get to do anything about it. If you don't like it you would have to have a revolution. Which is difficult once everyone is under nation-wide surveillance.
In a two party system, the people select their leaders through a variety of ways. Unfortunately for the US and EU to a lesser degree there isn't a lot of regulation on how propaganda can be amplified through social media, in contrast to how most countries regulate traditional media.
Tw
AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol in Go (Score:3)
China reaction: holy shit, we need to look into this AI stuff
Kai-Fu Lee says that game was China's “Sputnik moment” https://keithmccormick.com/113... [keithmccormick.com]
Straw purchases (Score:2)
All this means is some middleman are going to make a killing, and it will be slightly more expensive for China. You can fit a few of these things a briefcase. Try enforcing outgoing customs on every single country that claims to be complying with the export ban.