I’ll just note that NVidia’s moat has never been inference, and there are many chips used at a much larger scale than Chinese chips for inference like TPUs and AMD chips.

The other part is that it’s a bit of a meme here to say that the chip restriction is actually helping China (or shall I say, coordinated effort?). For once, we know that China has put a lot of pressure on the US to relax these controls multiple times. In addition to large chip smuggling networks (e.g. 22% of NVidia’s worldwide revenue magically comes from Singapore, and the ratio has been growing).

Lastly, assuming acceleration in AI (which we ARE seeing), there might not be time to China to catch up. The best estimate right now is that the first EUV chips from China will not come out before 2030. By that time who knows how powerful AI will be.

All I’m saying is that the discussion is so one sided and a bit baselesss with no nuance, that it seems either a meme/groupthink in the community or coordinated. If anything, the data suggests that the US should increase its export controls and better track the tech supply chain if it wants to further curb Chinese progress.

▲

menaerus an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Why do you think the Chinese are not using their ai chips, which afaics are from huawei, to train their models? If that is true, which I think it is, we don't have to wait until 2030 to see if they're gonna match the performance of nvidia GPU. The evidence is already here - glm is among the most competitive models out there.

▲

gpt5 an hour ago | parent [-]

Look up reports by The Information, DeepSeek’s training of its big models are all done on NVidia’s chips (more than that - on smuggled Blackwell as well). There have been attempts by many Chinese labs to train on Huawei h chips, but they have all been limited to more minor models or distillations of the bigger ones.

	▲	menaerus 38 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Unless you have the source for the latter it's nothing more than propaganda. Also, DeepSeek report is 2-3 years old, and at that time there were no huawei chips, at least not known to the public. This is a different model, in different age where huawei chips are already delivered into the production as we see

▲

edgyquant an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The idea that China wasn’t working hard to build their own chips is a political talking point period. Nothing has been sped up here, China was always going to do this and the backlash you see from people who are against it is only proof that restrictions do hurt them

▲

true_religion 42 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I do believe your first sentence, but the second one ... doesn't really follow.

The unnatural and sudden nature of the US chip embargo has galvanized the Chinese companies to speed up development. It makes economic sense to do so rather than pay inflated rates to essentially smuggle a necessary good, while never knowing if the embargo will be tightened and those under-the-table supply chains dry up as well.

Yes, there was a plan, but what was planned for 5 years from now is being done today, because if you wait 5 years, you'll be so far behind thanks to the effect of the embargo.

▲

dominotw an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> The idea that China wasn’t working hard to build their own chips is a political talking point period.

never heard of this 'talking point' . who is even saying this?

▲

stanfordkid an hour ago | parent [-]

It's an implied corollary: when folks say that "blocking US Chips is what led China to build it's own" they are implying it is US export restrictions that pushed China to innovate. OP is saying this isn't necessarily true. I don't think it is either: China seems to have succeeded due to a centrally planned economy that values independence, with high amounts of strategic government led technology investment.

	▲	vcryan 44 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It can be both. They were already doing it and the situation made it more urgent.
	▲	dominotw 40 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> OP is saying this isn't necessarily true. but your supposed corollary was > China wasn’t working hard to build their own chips kind of dishonest ?

▲

miroljub an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> All I’m saying is that the discussion is so one sided and a bit baselesss with no nuance, that it seems either a meme/groupthink in the community or coordinated. If anything, the data suggests that the US should increase its export controls and better track the tech supply chain if it wants to further curb Chinese progress.

Or, to put it bluntly, you are a proponent of the trade war.