Nvidia's Great Wall of GPUs: China's Hoarding Spree (tomshardware.com) 50
Press2ToContinue writes: 01.AI, a Chinese AI startup, has stockpiled enough Nvidia AI and HPC GPUs to last 18 months, in anticipation of a U.S. export ban. Looks like 01.AI is taking "goo big or go home" to a new level with their GPU shopping spree. They're basically the dragon from "The Hobbit," but instead of gold, they're hoarding Nvidia chips. Maybe they're planning the ultimate LAN party or just really into extreme Minecraft graphics. Either way, it's like they say: "In the land of tech embargoes, the one with the secret GPU stash is king." Or in this case, playing 4D chess while the rest of us are stuck figuring out which port the HDMI cable goes into. "We have stockpiled a lot of Nvidia chips," said 01.AI founder Kai-Fu Lee in an interview with Bloomberg. "The jury is out on whether China in 1.5 years can make equivalent or nearly as good chips."
"We will have two parallel universes. Americans will supply their products and technologies to the U.S. and other countries and Chinese companies will build for China and whoever else uses Chinese products. The reality is that they will not compete very much in the same marketplace."
"We will have two parallel universes. Americans will supply their products and technologies to the U.S. and other countries and Chinese companies will build for China and whoever else uses Chinese products. The reality is that they will not compete very much in the same marketplace."
Maybe we'll get lucky.. (Score:3)
And the company will fold, then be forced to sell off all it's hoard, tanking the prices of graphics cards since the market will be over saturated. One can dream.
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That is probably true, but the economic harm from that will be widespread.
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This is like the argument about phamaceutical prices. There's lots of consumer harm in there, but OTOH if you somehow short-circuit it and get the drugs to where they are needed, do you cut off the supply of new pharma?
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Don't hold your breath. It's reported that Nvidia already has a backlog of AI chips for nearly 12 months, and they are selling at 70% profit margin. And even if China came up with an equivalent product, Nvidia isn't standing still. They have already announced their next generation and said that they are on a one year cadence for new generations of AI chips.
At this rate, video cards are just an afterthought. Something for Team B to work on while waiting for vacancies in Team A. The sad thing is that eve
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You understand that that GPU chip hoard is a Chinese national security initiative and its going to the MSS/PLA AI research branch of the Chinese government, right?
There is zero chance of those GPUs ever being used for gamer graphics cards. On the other hand, the US chip ban has helped Nvidia with its overproduction of 3XXX series GPUs.
What should be interesting to see is how many years it will take for Chinese manufacturing to produce GPUs that match Nvidia's 3XXX series GPU "tensor" cores. Along with how
Re: Maybe we'll get lucky.. (Score:2)
The company will fold because the US sanctions thus far have been ineffective. The âlimitedâ(TM) Chinese cards are simply a bios flash away from being completely functional and the lack of functionality isnâ(TM)t even in a spec that would have great impact on the AI workloads.
It's not a mystery (Score:2)
I don't know why the summary speculates about what they need the cards for, but they're an AI startup and the linked article clearly spells out that they need cards that support NVIDIA's CUDA API.
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Interesting to see how this plays out (Score:4, Interesting)
For all of China's advances in tech - a result of hard work and intelligence, as well as of IP theft - their society and infrastructure are crumbling:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjj_mkc6b6s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USzMuewAfJA
The country is ruled by corruption, and it seems they're on the brink of demographic collapse. They're burning coal at a rate that largely offsets carbon reductions everywhere else in the world and they have horrendous pollution problems, despite their reputation as 'green' leaders. I suppose they can last for a while by looting the countries that get into bed with them; but unless and until they have viable leadership and can get rid of endemic corruption, it's hard to see how they can stave off collapse long enough to realize the economic "parallel universe" mentioned in TFS.
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youre right. china did outplay the west. for a time china could exploit slave labor to produce cheap goods and torture chinese citizens to earn dollars. now its coming back to bite them. because Xi has lost the mandate of heaven and floods have been seen in the old city, the time has come for the chinese government to fall. and now the west has started to sanction china. eventually those sanctions will bite at the same time Xi falls. Looks like capitalism is winning again. China will be reduced to poverty,
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Spoken like a true shill. I'm highly critical of the US and make no apologies for them, but even at that I have to say that your comment is, at best, a fantasy. At its worst, it's pure shillery. I suspect the latter, given your five-item posting history with its very obvious pro-totalitarian bias.
If you want to know about China from people who lived there for years and still have insider sources, search YouTube for 'laowhy86' and 'serpentza'. But if you are what I think you are, you're already familiar with
Re:Interesting to see how this plays out (Score:4, Insightful)
But only for the moment. Their emperor is a bit schizophrenic. He spent a lot of time and effort growing the economy, but in recent years he’s been basically liquidating that economic progress in order to get more direct control over the people. Which is exactly what Putin has been doing. A lot of Chinese people make a big deal about avoiding the mistakes that Russia made. From my western perspective, they seem to be in big danger of winding up at the exact same destination.
Ultimately, they’ll be fine as long as they don’t start any poorly-thought-out wars.
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Not Russia. Soviet Union. Current Russia, while not viewed as harshly as by Western Marxists who see them as traitors to the cause of Communist Revolution, it still viewed as merely a good examples of consequence of mistakes of Soviet Union. I.e. it's an example of an outcome of a massive failure of a state with similar system of governance, sharing the same Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist roots. Ergo the actual failure from which to learn you mention is Soviet Union. Not Russia, which is merely the final produc
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No, you did not visit "China". You visited that very little part of China which looks (and probably mostly is) civilized.
95% of the rest of China is NOT like that, at all.
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No, you did not visit "China". You visited that very little part of China which looks (and probably mostly is) civilized. 95% of the rest of China is NOT like that, at all.
Bullshit only 5% of China is modern.
There's plenty of rural and backwards parts of China. But it's nowhere near 95% You'd have to have some kind of mental problems, be pushing some propaganda angle, or just fishing for modpoints to claim something like that.
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OK, how much, then? 90%? 85%? 60%?
https://bmcpublichealth.biomed... [biomedcentral.com]
https://www.numbeo.com/quality... [numbeo.com]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
nice self own. (Score:1)
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Which cities outside tier 1 and maybe tier 2 did you visit? Though tier 2 is where you already should lose all pretentions about China being a developed nation as long as you don't hang in just the business center.
Most of China is neither T1 or T2. Those are seen as amazing islands of extreme wealth in the ocean of surrounding poverty. It's why people without hukou stream to those cities in spite of difficulties of living without it, as you get basically no meaningful government services if you're not in a
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Projection. The USA society and infrastructure are crumbling. I visited china and saw only a modern society. Bullet trains everywhere, modern cities, behaved vehicular traffic, behaved people, no crime, no poverty.
Yes, American society is in trouble, and infrastructure in some areas is in bad shape. But the rest of your comment is complete and utter bullshit. If you really were there and truly saw only what you claim, then you saw only what your handlers meant you to see. If that's not the case, then you're simply lying. I've seen the videos - many of them. I know that what you wrote is propaganda, whether or not you know it.
Also, China's problems absolutely dwarf America's problems, while America's freedoms - dimini
you braindead moron (Score:1)
You've seen some videos.
But the guy who actually went there only saw what people wanted him to see?
LOL you must be one of the stupidest people in existence to have come up with such complete and obvious bullshit.
It's you whose gone out of their way to drink the KoolAide and believe "some videos", but not the "other videos" that you don't like.
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they have horrendous pollution problems, despite their reputation as 'green' leaders.
The Chinese "capitalist" endeavors operates very much like a lobotomized brain. Take their great domestic construction boom, building "ghost" cities like Ordos (which has a large percentage of the city occupied now in 2023). Domestic housing construction was about propping up the Chinese GDP numbers, and having a place to park domestic capital. It had nothing to do with anticipating the number of Chinese needing to be housed.
"Green" manufacturing was about finding manufacturing niches to attract "Western
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This is a bit of a conflation of two issues.
Demographic crash is real and happening. No getting around that. And while being on the path of Japan and South Korea, China is different in that it will grow old before it gets rich, unlike the other two. That reduces the buffer they can use to soften the blow.
At the same time whoever, they're totalitarian with long standing history of just pointing some of their people at other people in their country in case of rebellion, label them "black class" and watch the
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Corruption on the other hand is not a bad thing in China, but a good one. It's an intentional plant by Deng and his dynasty/clique within CCP, as a way to subvert Marxist theology from within. Sure, the state remains built on Marxist tenets, always looking for the next oppressor to sic the PLA at. But if you introduce massive corruption at every level, state's ability to actually wield this power becomes impotent. Doesn't matter what orders Chairman gives when bureaucrats two layers down interpret it in the exact opposite way from which it was intended, and steal most of the money meant for implementation of said policy on top of it.
I'm not knowledgeable enough to comment on the rest of what you said, and it sounds credible and reasonable. And most of what you said about corruption agrees with what I've heard or deduced. But saying it's "not a bad thing"?
I suppose that's true for rivals and opponents of China, because it has resulted in utterly rotten and deadly infrastructure, and unimaginable amounts of waste as large tracts of land are used as dumping grounds for things like brand new electric vehicles that went pretty much from the
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This objection is on point, and I need to clarify what I meant.
I find it to be a good thing, because of what it accomplished. PRC went from "find a member of a black class, drag him before the lunching squad, conduct a struggle session and murder him" to "talented people who used to be members of the black class because of their talents can actually contribute to society without being hounded for it".
It was CCP's take on Stakhanovite movement, and it replaced the single most genocidal movement in human hist
Re: Interesting to see how this plays out (Score:2)
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Funny, as everything you mention can be said about the US.
I mostly agree. But I think it's true of the US to a much smaller extent than it is of China. At least for the time being; I believe America is on the same path, and I don't see any strong indications of a turnaround. The elites have been pretty successful with gaslighting and with their 'divide and conquer' strategy. Wealth and control are heavily concentrated at the top; and any structure that top-heavy is in danger of either crumbling or falling over.
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I was thinking "goo big or goo hoome". I'm sure they will fix it. This one is bad enough to catch the admins' attentions.
"goo big or go home"
Is that "goo big", or "big goo"? (Score:2)
If Chinese "AI" is anything like a Chinese car, then I know the answer.
Kai-fu Lee is an interesting guy (Score:4, Informative)
https://www.amazon.com/AI-Supe... [amazon.com] And he has a Lex Fridman interview where he specifically addresses China copying the West (24:55) and at the hour mark (1:00:00) comments on what a shame it is for the US&China to focus on using AI in Cold war militarization rather than put the money and effort to improving the world, especially the 3rd world which is going to be left behind by the AI revolution. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Born Taiwanese, US citizen, working in China. So he has intimate knowledge of China-Taiwan dynamics yet does not think it such a threat that he should abandon his work in China.
He's a cool guy, but his income (and possibly life) depend on the Chinese government, so he's not unbiased either.
haha (Score:1)
"We have stockpiled a lot of Nvidia chips," said 01.AI founder Kai-Fu Lee in an interview with Bloomberg. "The jury is out on whether China in 1.5 years can make equivalent or nearly as good chips."
I just got modded down for saying it's not clear whether China can match Western progress with regular infusions of tech from here, and here's the Chinese guy who owns the company that's stocking GPUs saying the same thing.