Why was it bad?

His argument was “we must not make it more convenient to develop a fully domestic stack”

Keep your friends close and your enemies closer is a fairly reasonable adage

China was already "developing a fully domestic stack" either way.

So the only thing selling to them accomplishes is give Nvidia more margins. At the cost of boosting the Chinese AI sector - possibly to the point of parity.

China at the moment has the capability to do infrastructural rollouts far faster than US or Europe, but doesn't have the chips to stuff new datacenters with. So it's easy to see why China would want the chips. But it's not like Nvidia is having trouble selling their AI accelerators outside China - and they can't ramp up accelerator production on demand. More demand for accelerators would push the prices even higher, and that would reflect in the margins, but the benefits for Nvidia weren't even that large.

So it was a questionable push all around - even before the spy scandal.

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eecc 16 hours ago | parent [-]

So why is China leaving the chips stuck in customs?

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/nvidia-chips-pile-up-hon...

	▲	ACCount39 15 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Political posturing would be my first guess. China also used to posture with "we don't need Nvidia chips" in Q1 this year. But now, schemes to ship those chips anyway are being uncovered - in the wake of Jensen's ousting and in general. Some involve direct shipments, and others involve offshored datacenters being established by Chinese companies to supply compute to China. So we know this "we don't need" was always fake. Chinese government was saying "we don't need them chips" with one hand and devising ways of keeping the supply going with the other.