China's Chip Imports Fell By a Record 15% Due To US Sanctions, Globally Weaker Demand (tomshardware.com) 49
According to Bloomberg, China's chip import value dropped significantly by 15.4% in 2023, from $413 billion to $349 billion. "Chip sales were down across the board in 2023 thanks to a weakening global economy, but China's chip imports indicate that its economy might be in trouble," reports Tom's Hardware. "The country's inability to import cutting-edge silicon is also certainly a factor in its decreasing chip imports." From the report: In 2022, the value of chip imports to China stood at $413 billion, and in 2023 the country only imported chips worth a total of $349 billion, a 15.4% decrease in value. That a drop happened at all isn't surprising; even TSMC, usually considered to be one of the most advanced fabbing corporation in the world, saw its sales decline by 4.5%. However, a 15.4% decrease in shipments is much more significant, and indicates China has particular issues other than weaker demand across the world.
China's ongoing economic issues, such as its high deflation could play a part. Deflation is when currency increases in value, the polar opposite of inflation, when currency loses value. As inflation has been a significant problem for countries such as the U.S. and UK, deflation might sound much more appealing, but economically it can be problematic. A deflationary economy encourages consumers not to spend, since money is increasing in value, meaning buyers can purchase more if they wait. In other words, deflation decreases demand for products like semiconductors.
However, shipment volume only decreased by 10.8% compared to the 15.4% decline in value, meaning the chips that China didn't buy in 2023 were particularly valuable. This likely reflects U.S. sanctions on China, which prevents it from buying top-end graphics cards, especially from Nvidia. The H100, H200, GH200, and the RTX 4090 are illegal to ship to China, and they're some of Nvidia's best GPUs. The moving target for U.S. sanctions could also make exporters and importers more tepid, as it's hard to tell if more sanctions could suddenly upend plans and business deals.
China's ongoing economic issues, such as its high deflation could play a part. Deflation is when currency increases in value, the polar opposite of inflation, when currency loses value. As inflation has been a significant problem for countries such as the U.S. and UK, deflation might sound much more appealing, but economically it can be problematic. A deflationary economy encourages consumers not to spend, since money is increasing in value, meaning buyers can purchase more if they wait. In other words, deflation decreases demand for products like semiconductors.
However, shipment volume only decreased by 10.8% compared to the 15.4% decline in value, meaning the chips that China didn't buy in 2023 were particularly valuable. This likely reflects U.S. sanctions on China, which prevents it from buying top-end graphics cards, especially from Nvidia. The H100, H200, GH200, and the RTX 4090 are illegal to ship to China, and they're some of Nvidia's best GPUs. The moving target for U.S. sanctions could also make exporters and importers more tepid, as it's hard to tell if more sanctions could suddenly upend plans and business deals.
Someone please explain (Score:2)
More seriously, are they THAT much better for AI computing? Cant someone string 10 last-gen cards together and get the same performance? Sure, at 5-10 times the energy cost. So what? We’re not talking about consumer grade computing where pennies matter.
I don’t think that reverse engineering is the issue, right? China can look at current-n
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Because AI is increasing rapidly and is a dual-use technology with military and cybersecurity applications.
It's not currently a massive threat, but the writing is on the wall.
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Because the 4090 is a tiny bit too fast. There's a computer bar above which chips are not allowed to be shipped there. The 4090 exceeds that by a few percentage points.
Does that make sense? Are they that much better for AI? Maybe, maybe not. These are government policies; don't dig too deep for logic, you won't find it. There has to be a line, someone drew it, 4090 was over it.
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I’m not a cs/ee type. The RTX4090 is illegal to ship to China? Why? Please explain. Cause Chinese teenagers will get a leg up in their FPS matches?
No, but because some western politicians are invested in the delusion that the next (real, not-video-game) wars will be won by those owning the fastest GPUs.
More seriously, are they THAT much better for AI computing? Cant someone string 10 last-gen cards together and get the same performance?
Yes, and China already runs some high-end supercomputers based on crazy high numbers of less-than-cutting-edge chips.
Is there a legit reason here?
Keeping the illusion of ever-lasting technology superiority of "the west" alive for a few more years, while not bothering to explain the public the financial and political costs that past decades of short-sighted, hell-bent outsourcing in
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The RTX4090 is illegal to ship to China? Why? Please explain.
The U.S. routinely restricts export of certain things for national security reasons. Simply Googling your question RTX4090 is illegal to ship to China [google.com] yields several pages discussing this in particular. The article, U.S. Govt Restricts Shipments of GeForce RTX 4090 to China, Other Countries [tomshardware.com] links to the specific U.S. document Implementation of Additional Export Controls: Certain Advanced Computing Items; Supercomputer and Semiconductor End Use; Updates and Corrections [cusersrpuc...ng20ifrpdf] that says:
These revisions protect U.S. national security interests by further restricting China’s ability to obtain critical technologies to modernize its military capabilities in ways that threaten the national security interests of the United States and its allies.
Another article notes Nvi [theverge.com]
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I totally understand the restrictions on the most advanced chip fab systems. That’s serious tech with severe dual-use concerns.
But the top-shelf GPUs themselves? They’re nice and all, but I’m pretty sure you can get the same computational power by ganging together a handful of last-gen chips.
Re:Someone please explain (Score:4, Informative)
But the top-shelf GPUs themselves? They’re nice and all, but I’m pretty sure you can get the same computational power by ganging together a handful of last-gen chips.
GPUs are more specialized and have a greater capacity for doing complex math closer to real-time than general-purpose CPUs -- even older GPUs vs newer CPUs, to a point. Google GPU vs CPU [google.com] for a bunch of articles. These two from 2021 talk a bit about military situations, though 'm sure there are others sources too.
- CPU vs. GPU: The Paradigm Shift [systelusa.com]
- Why the Armed Forces Must Prioritize Secure, Made-In-USA GPU Computers [trentonsystems.com]
I'll note that the U.S.Government doesn't have to explain why it restricts the export of something and, in many cases, prefers not to, at least in any detail, as that itself might tip off why it wants to keep something to itself ...
Re: Someone please explain (Score:2)
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Cant someone string 10 last-gen cards together and get the same performance? Sure, at 5-10 times the energy cost. So what? We’re not talking about consumer grade computing where pennies matter.
The reason that GPUs are so popular for AI training is not that they have a bunch of ALUs. Rather it's the memory subsystem plus the software support to take advantage of the memory. It's also this reason why one cannot simply pool together a bunch of ALUs and think that the resulting TOPS is equivalent to the equivalent TOPS GPU. This is also one of the challenges of ASICs and programmable processors like the TPU. GPUs have been developed over the last 15 years to provide a lot of memory bandwidth for
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> Someone please explain
> I’m not a cs/ee type. The RTX4090 is illegal to ship to China? Why? Please explain.
In the irony of all ironies I'll let American based AI ChatGPT explain why:
You
Why does the US have GPU export restrictions to China
ChatGPT
As of my last knowledge update in January 2022, the United States has imposed export restrictions on certain technologies, including GPUs (Graphics Processing Units), to China for several reasons. It's important to note that the geopolitical and trade l
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1) Training
2) Inference
If you visit websites like GraphCore's who makes chips specifically for ML, you'll find they focus almost entirely on optimizing for the Python library pyTorch.
If you visit Huawei's website and their Atlas machine learning compute systems, they focus on Pangu and PyTorch.
Training tends to require some big iron to run. This is because Python libraries for training models are extremely inefficient in exchange for being very usable.
Chip vendors (Score:2)
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Of course they can. The government can legally prohibit exports of anything at all and they routinely do. In the case of ASML, they are legally free to export to China, but they would then come under US sanctions themselves.
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Re: Chip vendors (Score:2)
Back when ASML was developing EUV technology, one of their corporate acquisitions was a US company called Cymer, specializing in lithography light sources.
Supposedly, as a condition of being allowed to buy the company, ASML may have made some agreements with the US government. Also, the US has a intergovernmental agreement with the government of the Netherlands, regarding technology exports.
Re:Chip vendors (Score:4, Informative)
The US should not be able to prohibit people from selling wares on the free market, if those wares were not created with tax-payer funds to begin with ...
The U.S. routinely restricts export of certain things for national security reasons via its Export Controls [trade.gov]. Anyone who's ever had a security clearance knows all about this. Any U.S. company, like Nvidia, is bound by U.S. law and foreign companies may also be affected by U.S. Export Controls as noted in U.S. Export Control and Sanctions Laws [hklaw.com]
The Economic Sanctions regulations affect not only U.S. companies in their potential relationships with Cuba, Iran, Syria and Sudan, but also may affect foreign companies as well, particularly foreign subsidiaries of U.S. companies.
You may not like this, but that's the way it is ...
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Re: Chip vendors (Score:1)
Maybe, though China typically doesn't insist on making everything itself, and has been happy to pay a fair price for stuff made elsewhere.
Placing sanctions on items does alter their motivations and focus, so makes the sanctions, ultimately, self defeating. Unless, you think that the Chinese actually aren't able to make them without the USA...but I should note that TSMC is evidence to the contrary, as are all the Chinese involved in developing such product elsewhere around the world.
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Now, understand why Taiwan is so important (Score:3)
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https://undispatch.com/what-wo... [undispatch.com]
The CCP is really, really, REALLY hoping they can convince the Taiwanese population to voluntarily give up or the US to lose it’s nerve. Otherwise they’re looking at a Ukraine-style meatgrinder but with no way out for the elderly, women and children, an island with a badly reduced population and no sur
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As an American, I consider this a very dangerous game of brinkmanship and I honestly wouldn't be too disa
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The invasion of Taiwan will be over virtually before it begins. Taiwan has no ability to last more than a few hours. This has been true for 10 years and it gets more unbalanced by the year. They know this, we know this. Formosa itself is a small island with a limited population concentrated in a few locations. Their ability to defend and/or maintain that defense against the relatively limitless resources of China is unlikely. Our ability to project power into that area is unlikely as well. Modern ASM
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Re: Now, understand why Taiwan is so important (Score:1)
The PRC hasn't been motivated to recover Taiwan by chips. It's motivation was more sovereignty and territorial integrity, and keeping those who consider the PRC as an enemy off the island - yes, that's the USA mostly, though also it's allies, most notably Japan (see history).
With the sanctions, though, chips have been added to the mix of motivations, but the PRC is not stupid and realise that recovering Taiwan by force will likely result in loss of those capabilities, so the motivation is replaced by the op
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It's motivation was more sovereignty and territorial integrity,
It is not, and that's PRC propaganda. The PRC has ever in it's entire history ruled over the territory in Taiwan. It's not "integrity" to gain a new piece of territory which someone else controls. It's pure expansionism and jingoism.
Still, the Chinese on Taiwan aren't stupid either, and the recent election results show their support for the DPP has dropped significantly (~30%) so maybe it'd only take one more election to remove that delusional
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China interfered in Taiwan's recent election, but the anti-China candidate won anyway, so it looks like politically they won't be getting any closer.
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Except fabs are horrendously expensive and by all measures, very fragile. They must maintain an extremely clean environment, use extremely clean water and other things.
All it would take to disable a fab would be to open a door to the outside world - leave a door open from the fab to the outside and you'll contaminate the air that will take weeks to clean out. Do it with the machines running and you'll probably have months worth of cleanup.
AKM in Japan caught on fire in 2020. As far as I can see, it's still
So China has increased its export surplus... (Score:2)
I am all for changing that, but the "US sanctions" certainly do not.
Various things going on in China's economy (Score:1)
They're just starting to hit the leading edge of shrinking working age population vs retired age due to one child policy.
Their debt to gdp ratio for 2023 was officially at 299% but since 2008 their gdp numbers have been inflated so the real ratio is likely higher.
Ghost cities: well known issue in the real estate market where people spend way too much money to buy apartments in places with no need which aren't getting finished because that money was spent by the construction company on the next set of apartm
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Entirely true, however, given 2 choices: help push over a totalitarian regime that wants to take over the world and continue to trade with and thus help prop up and strengthen that regime which is the morally correct option?
If we replaced "China" with "Nazi Germany in the mid 1930s" would you be concerned about what Hitler might do if we had isolated Germany and tried to collapse his government through economic sanctions?
Bad people are going to do bad things either way. I suggest that helping them out is
Maybe they're getting chips anyway (Score:3)
Given the extent to which household-name American corporations aided the Nazis in WWII, I'd be surprised if the latest Nvidia chips aren't making their way to China in defiance of mere economic sanctions. Also, what's the basis for the belief that we have accurate figures for Chinese imports? The Chinese certainly aren't going to provide accurate figures; and anybody selling to them via clandestine channels is going to make sure that the records of those transactions fly under the radar of financial analysts.
missing data (Score:2)
So China imported 15% less chips... the real question is, how much of this 15% was replaced with internal production and how much is a real decrease in chip supply.
domestic production explosion (Score:1)
Meanwhile domestic chip revenue up 40 percent year over year in last six months, China is weaning itself off imports, what a surprise.
Sanctions of west are pointless, most the human race doesn't live there.
BS reporting no counting the big price drops of SS (Score:1)
BS reporting no counting the big price drops of SSDs and Drams during the year.