The article doesn’t say, but I assume these are SOTA AI chips? If so, it’s a huge deal that American can build them.

Another interesting point:

> AMD and larger rival Nvidia Corp. recently gained a reprieve on restrictions imposed on shipments of some types of artificial intelligence accelerators to China. It’s still not clear how many licenses will be granted — or how long the companies will be allowed to ship the chips to the country, the biggest market for semiconductors.

It sounds like they’re trying to give China some chips but not as many as American allied countries. I wonder if they’re trying to get China “addicted” to western AI chips to hurt Chinese chip manufacturing development?

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pythonguython 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

They can make advanced chips in Arizona, but the bleeding edge is in Taiwan. Arizona can make TSMC’s 4nm process, but in Taiwan they’re doing 3nm and ramping up 2nm.

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procgen 5 days ago | parent [-]

Progress on the 2nm facility (P3) in Arizona is apparently ahead of schedule, slated to be operational in 2027

	▲	bgnn 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		It's TSMC and Taiwanese state policy is to lag the US fabs bu couple of years as they don't want to lose their strategic importance and their protection that comes with it.

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karmakaze 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Export restrictions work similarly to tariffs or subsidies. In the long term they limit domestic products from global competition. DeepSeek comes up with more efficient algorithms out of necessity to compete using lesser hardware. Companies with deep pockets like OpenAI will be first and best, but only for a limited period if they don't invest in efficiency as well as capability.

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BrawnyBadger53 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That is certainly what they are lobbying for and I think I agree with the lobbyists for once. Huawei is shaping up to become a strong competitor if left at it and it's probably in the US's best interest to just let Nvidia and AMD sell to China to maintain the hardware monopoly for longer.

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dagmx 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That is their goal because they saw their restrictions had just made China accelerate domestic development instead.

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mattnewton 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Exactly what most AI researchers would have predicted, if you force like 30% of the worlds top ai researchers to use something other than CUDA, they’ll work on improving the tools for something other than CUDA.

It’s wild the same administrations would argue for restricting access to the US market for tariffs to strengthen domestic production, would not believe that severely restricting exports to the Chinese market would strengthen their domestic production

	▲	MBCook 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		You’re assuming rationality.

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FirmwareBurner 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

China would be stupid to stop the acceleration of its domestic development right now.

	▲	jpgvm 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		If anything I could see the Chinese government moving to blocking import of Nvidia and AMD accelerators as time goes on. They can't afford to right now but you can bet they want to.

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lossolo 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> I wonder if they’re trying to get China “addicted” to western AI chips to hurt Chinese chip manufacturing development?

This has nothing to do with that. It was part of the deal made with China recently in Geneva. The U.S. needs what China has (rare metals), and China needs what the U.S. has (SOTA chips).

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happyopossum 5 days ago | parent [-]

> (rare metals in a place where nobody cares how they're harvested as opposed to the ones in North America that can't be mined due to ecological concerns)

There - that's a little more accurate.

	▲	jpgvm 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		It's really not just ecological concerns and tbh the mining really isn't that big of a deal. It's entirely the processing that is the problem, ecologically sure but mostly technically. Without the Chinese machines that do the processing because yes, you guessed it they are the only country in the world that makes most of them, you end up more than 20-30% less efficient. At that point on the world market you just aren't competitive at all. This is all assuming you can get past the NIMBYs to build the plants in the first place.