Nvidia sees Huawei, Intel in rear mirror as it grapples with China ban

Nvidia chief Jensen Huang reckons Huawei and Intel are potential challengers for the GPU-maker's crown in the AI accelerator space, and says it is working out a deal with the US to keep selling products to China. The Santa Clara-based GPU biz continues to rake in the cash thanks to the booming interest in AI, disclosing …

[PhilipN]

"..shadowy .... covert ..."

You mean, as in the USA, Taiwan, Netherlands the entire ecosystem is not public knowledge?

[mark l 2]

"If you redesign a chip around a particular cut line that enables them to do AI, I'm going to control it the very next day," she said, referring to semiconductors bound for the Middle Kingdom. "We cannot let China get these chips. Period."

While you might slow China down with trade restrictions, they are already doing AI, so you won't be able to put the genie back in the bottle now banning Nvidia selling to them. China with still get there with their own AI with or without the US tech.

[Anonymous Coward]

And if you handicap Nvidia so much that they drop out of the market you are left behind China while spending $$$$ supporting Intel national champions

[StrangerHereMyself]

But AI isn't useful if it's a hundred times slower than "our" AI.

The only reason China is interested in AI is because it hopes it will gain them a military advantage over the U.S. in a possible confrontation. They're not in it for science or the public benefit. Anyone who believes this needs to get his head examined.

[TheInstigator]

lol keep sipping the cool aid - say what you want about China, at least they don't enable other countries to commit genocide

[StrangerHereMyself]

Spirit

There's the letter of the law and the spirit of the law. In the letter of the law there are all sorts of technical limits imposed on GPU's sold to China, like cores, IOPS, bandwidth and memory size.

However, the spirit of the law is simply this: "Don't sell any AI GPU's to China!" Obviously the U.S. government can't say this out loud because China would immediately start OECD proceedings, but I'm somewhat surprised this hasn't been communicated to NVidia and other GPU makers privately.

NVidia believes it can maneuver around these restrictions, but it really shouldn't if I read between the lines.