In that case I hope advancement in semicon tooling and materials can have some spillover effect to non semicon industry.
Chinese semiconductor industry
- Thread starter Hendrik_2000
- Start date
- Status
I don't think the bans are targeting GPUs in general. It's only about very few, niche and state-of-the-art GPUs. As much as the US doesn't like China's cloud providers, those same cloud providers sell huge volumes of Intel/AMD servers and Nvidia/AMD GPUs, the vast majority of them are relatively low-end and commodity servers. All these US companies have very large revenue from China, Intel alone over $20 billion.
In any case, it makes sense for Chinese cloud providers to gradually replace them with domestic CPUs & GPUs as the latter make steady progress.
Sure, currently it only targets state of the art GPUs used for AI. But US admin may find it more important to try to destroy China's cloud services in in the international market rather than help Nvidia/AMD/Intels. At this point, any Chinese tech company that relies on American CPU/GPUs need to find alternative solutions. This means not only the higher end BR100 GPUs, but also lower end GPU and server CPUs.
US Deals Heavy Blow to China Tech Ambitions With Nvidia Chip Ban
- US government imposed new license requirement on China exports
- Strictures will hurt Chinese cloud providers and automakers
The Santa Clara, California-based company disclosed in a regulatory filing this week it can no longer sell certain high-end chips in China without a license from Washington. These AI accelerators go into large data centers to train AI models for tasks like autonomous driving, image recognition and voice assistance.
Nvidia has nearly a 95% share of that market, according to Fubon Securities Investment Services estimates, and the rest is accounted for by , a fellow US chip firm that’s bound by the same export restrictions. Without access to their gear, tech giants that rely on big server farms to develop everything from electric and self-driving cars to social and cloud services will be at a disadvantage to international competition.
“This is the new Cold War reality and broader export restrictions are part and parcel of this,” said Amir Anvarzadeh of Asymmetric Advisors. “The export restrictions will broaden and it will impact semiconductors, AI, autonomous systems and biotech.”
The escalated trade curbs, which Washington didn’t signal it was considering before imposing them, add to existing sanctions and limits on exports of chipmaking gear to China. Chinese semiconductor firms are already denied access to the most advanced lithography equipment from the Netherlands’ and cutting-edge gear from American suppliers including
The recent CHIPS Act in the US forces global chipmakers to effectively choose between investing in the US and China. Now that Washington is limiting access to AI products as well, it’s created another chokepoint for Beijing’s tech expansion while working on growing its own domestic semiconductor capability.
The head of one of China’s leading EV manufacturers quickly decried the restrictions.
The measures will “bring a challenge to the cloud training of all autonomous driving,” He Xiaopeng, the chairman and chief executive officer of , said on his WeChat account. Nvidia is a leader in providing the hardware for autonomous driving -- both for developing the algorithms in massive server farms and supplying the onboard processors for cars to be aware of their surroundings.
Washington has told Nvidia that the new curbs are designed to prevent advanced AI gear being used for or diverted to military purposes by China or Russia. In June of this year, Washington, DC-based think tank The Center for Security and Emerging Technology almost all of the 97 AI chips in public Chinese military purchase records between April and November 2020 were designed by US firms Nvidia, , or Xilinx, which is now part of AMD.
Still, the brunt of the impact will be felt by Nvidia itself and China’s biggest tech firms like and , which are the closest rivals to US cloud services from ’s AWS, ’s Google Cloud and ’s Azure.
The Chinese government US restrictions on chip exports to the country because the move hurts the legitimate rights and interests of both Chinese and American firms, China commerce ministry spokesperson Shu Jueting said at a briefing on Thursday, in response to a question about Nvidia’s disclosure. China urges the US to stop the practice immediately and treat companies from all countries fairly, he said.
At a basic level, an AI accelerator is a graphics processor, or GPU, specifically tailored to train AI models by feeding them tons of data. It’s better suited for such tasks than a general-purpose CPU because its architecture can do parallel work in huge volumes. Nvidia was the first to come up with a language to make GPUs do AI tasks, giving it a huge head start over rivals like AMD and Intel.
last month secured to deploy the first fully autonomous self-driving taxis on China’s roads. Along with domestic rivals like and XPeng, Baidu is among the first companies globally to roll out such services -- but that lead is threatened without the continued ability to develop using Nvidia’s hardware.
The US has given Nvidia a year to wrap up development work in China on its most advanced H100 server chip, underlining that it doesn’t want its companies working on sensitive tech within Chinese borders. Nvidia also said the restrictions may cost it $400 million in the current quarter and it may have to move some operations out of China.
The current-generation A100 chip from Nvidia is one of the world’s most sophisticated, with 54 billion transistors, while the next-generation H100 -- which no Chinese firms will be able to buy without explicit US approval -- will be built on TSMC’s 4nm process and have 80 billion transistors on board.
Big data center AI customers in China have been buying Nvidia’s gaming graphics cards as a substitute, though that requires significant modifications to deploy, according to Jeff Pu of Haitong International Securities. Washington’s move “will accelerate the development of local datacenter GPUs such as Alibaba’s” and it will boost sentiment for domestic stocks in the sector, he said.
China’s is to a homegrown alternative to Nvidia or AMD for AI chipmaking and its shares jumped more than 30% over two days after the curbs were announced.
Non paywall source:
This is the article from Bloomberg. The euphoria among Anglophone media and think tanks is palpable. The earthquake of Dengist coupling for 40 years with the US are felt far and wide 25 years after his death. Will be a wide ride to remove one generation of toxic Dengist legacy in our supply chains, behaviour and our heads. There is massive behavioral inertia at play. The cost and time of untanging all those Dengist high tech umbilical cords? Mindboggling.
Last edited:
antiterror13
Brigadier
Yeah, exactly!
There lies the big question mark.
1) Why do this ban of that H100 chip now? This chip is developed in China, close to full completion. Now it is banned from China? Are those guys serious? Are those guy retarded?
2) Although I have not looked that website that ranked servers lately, the best servers in the world and by a lot where no one is going to catch up soon, are Chinese made. This H100 will not make a difference in the market for data center products. Why do we think Huawei was able to make so many deals across ASEAN, the Middle East, Africa, and South America, because they were providing a completion solution, the network, the data center, and any further products to do whatever you want to do, even industrial fish farming.
The people in the US government dreaming up these bans, seem unaware of the technology world at large.
simply in panic mode, probably not in full panic mode (yet)
When you are in panic mode, i.e. during fire or flood in your house, you won't be thinking rationally
This is another one of those "appear to be tough" acts now fashionable in the west .I can bet my pension that a year from now we will hear -from Republican Senators-
of how the commerce department has granted Nvidia licenses to sell the same chips to China worth billions of dollars. .A really bad year for NVidia.
-The raytracing gimmick failed miserable.
-The crypto mining crash.
-AMD eating their launch for first time.
- And they are going to get their AI-Cloud launch eaten by every single AI and GPU company in China thanks to Uncle Sam.
-The raytracing gimmick failed miserable.
-The crypto mining crash.
-AMD eating their launch for first time.
- And they are going to get their AI-Cloud launch eaten by every single AI and GPU company in China thanks to Uncle Sam.
Last edited:
You know what folks, I was trying to find that story about the data center severs performance, which I found, then read and try to simplify it somewhat so everyone can easily understand, even though I have a tough time figuring out trying what the material is saying, I thought of something.
If someone wants to do the edge computing, which is to say to have a data center at one particular point in their network, they have to figure what is the optimal configuration and all that. That could be complicated.
Such as how much data, it is just simple requests, or high powered computing is required with lots of calculations?
The design of the network is important, and how to fit that data center in there.
That made me realize something about these American bans. They are all simple bans, as they think banning one item will affect the entire operations.
No. It does not work that way. The network is pretty complicated.
The US government is fixated on simple solutions!
Ban a single chip!
Geez, when did that ever work for them.
They should just go ahead and topple Saddam Hussein again, to get the simple solution fix.
If someone wants to do the edge computing, which is to say to have a data center at one particular point in their network, they have to figure what is the optimal configuration and all that. That could be complicated.
Such as how much data, it is just simple requests, or high powered computing is required with lots of calculations?
The design of the network is important, and how to fit that data center in there.
That made me realize something about these American bans. They are all simple bans, as they think banning one item will affect the entire operations.
No. It does not work that way. The network is pretty complicated.
The US government is fixated on simple solutions!
Ban a single chip!
Geez, when did that ever work for them.
They should just go ahead and topple Saddam Hussein again, to get the simple solution fix.
- Status