Wow, that is fascinating, I didn't realize China was now blocking foreign chips, lol. It's not a definitive indicator, but I feel that doesn't bode well for US dominance in this area -- when your competitor thinks they'd be helping _you_ by using your resources, that's not great.

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saghm 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I don't know that it's clear that the motivation is that it's "helping" their competitors directly. Maybe the motivation is "if we rely on these, then the next time a US president arbitrarily decides to block us from buying them, we won't have the infrastructure already in place to be able to work around it". It seems more betting on a shorter-term cost with less uncertainty in the long term rather than a shorter-term win with a lot harder to quantify risks in the long term.

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overfeed an hour ago | parent [-]

This was the Chinese government burning the boats[0]. Beyond the symbolism and ensuring everyone's commitment, they want to direct the firehose of AI money towards a local champion (Huawei). Money, and experience bourne of being in the trenches developing, manufacturing, deploying and debugging on actual workloads will supercharge how quickly Huawei get good, compared to when they had to fairly compete against a well-resourced Nvidia

0. Though it's not absolute - there's still the Singapore-based clusters loop-hole, that the Chinese government may choose the degree to which it turns a blind eye to, if progress is slow.

	▲	FooBarWidget 31 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The money and resources aren't going to Huawei exclusively, but to a whole range of companies. This selection changes over time as new companies show promise, or previously selected companies prove themselves to be incompetent. For example there are like 6 different technical tracks of EUV development. They're not committing to one technical direction, it's exploring all of them.

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culi 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They've achieved self-sufficiency in >14nm chips in remarkable timing. Unfortunately for DeepSeek, it's the <14nm chips that are needed for massive training tasks. I wouldn't be surprised if China backs down and lets them purchase the chips given that they are still years away from being able to make them themselves. Either that or the gov't steps in and forces them to share resources

And even if Huawei's Ascend 910C can compete with NVIDIA's H200, CUDA is still a large moat

	▲	seewhydee 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Bypassing the CUDA moat is, in fact, one of the major tasks Deepseek set for itself. Their efforts in this area are likely one of the main reasons for their slow release cadence, culminating in their v4 inference setup that runs on Huawei Ascend chips.

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cmrdporcupine 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think the point is more than by banning the NVIDIA hardware they are forcing local development of potentially competitive hardware, basically giving Huawei a subsidy or leg-up.