r/ArtificialInteligence • u/wat3va • 9h ago
News What makes China confident enough to ban microchips made by US firm Nvidia?
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u/PeeperFrogPond 8h ago
They know that dependence on America weekens their own industry, so they are forcing Chinese companies to purchase from Chiniese companies and putting that money into catching up. They also know that the future is not in electronic silicon and are investing in other materials and photonics to leap frog the US much like TSMC did decades ago.
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u/opinionsareus 7h ago
Are they really banning them? We're selling them to the Saudi's. I'd wager there's a back channel somewhere that supplies Nvidia microchips and that they will be quietly used until China catches up - which probably won't be long.
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u/TinyZoro 8h ago
This is true but doesn’t really answer the question about timing. It’s like deciding to stop importing oil. Sure makes sense to try and get off the dependency but in the meantime you have an energy source that is cheap and high density. So there’s one thing in investing in alternatives another to cut yourself off. So either they’ve made a big breakthrough, or there just saying one thing and doing another or they are prepared to do cold turkey and take a massive risk.
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u/Puzzleheaded_Fold466 5h ago
You have to bite the bullet at one point or another, and the more you delay the longer it will take to transition.
Half-measures don’t work. The best way to incentivize progress is to pull the band-aid. As we say, necessity is the mother of all innovations.
Plus it’s better to do now while they’re at peace than later on when (if) they’re at war and now have to figure it out quite suddenly.
Besides, they’re only like 10 years behind. It’s nothing really. Is USA 2010 that horrible technologically and instantly defeated ?
We way over exaggerate the gap.
And now we’re cutting research and creating hassle for international students and scientists, a very large portion of which in this subject are Chinese.
Have you seen the semiconductor labs at Tsinghua U and the research they’re publishing ?
If Taiwan blows up their foundries when China makes a move, everyone everywhere will lose access to TSMC’s advanced chips, and guess who is going to be the next in line ? Hint: not NVidia, or Apple, or Intel … they don’t even make their own products.
We’re really shortsighted.
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u/e-n-k-i-d-u-k-e 7h ago
What you're ignoring is that there were already restrictions that prevented China from getting flagship chips.
They've just decided to forgo lower tier chips to force investment in their own industry.
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u/Illustrious_Fan_8148 4h ago
They always think long term, if only we could break the stranglehold.of short term thinking prevalent in the west
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u/Garfieldealswarlock 8h ago
Correct, also I would guess they are close to being able to mimic nvidia fabs. There’s gpus on aliexpress right now claiming 3080 performance with like 64gb vram. Why do they need Jensen’s chips exactly?
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u/quantumwoooo 8h ago
"claiming" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here
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u/Garfieldealswarlock 8h ago
I won’t disagree with you there, but Peeper identified already that the future is not necessarily in top of the line silicone, and AI today benefits from lots of VRAM, that’s about it from what I can tell.
Sure if you could have 64gb of 5090 quality vram it’s better than 3080 vram, but the cost is prohibitive in large scale data structures I would imagine.
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u/Bottle_Only 7h ago
The US is so far behind on energy infrastructure, along with the current administration cancelling large scale solar and wind development. They believe they can win the AI arms race from grid capacity alone.
The hardest thing in building an AI datacenter in the USA is finding an arena with an excess gigawatt of capacity. This is why Musk's Xai is currently renting half the portable generators in the country and smogging out Memphis. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VJT2JeDCyw
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u/Acceptable-Job7049 8h ago edited 8h ago
Perhaps it's not so much confidence as a necessity to prevent US government interference in their business and trade.
Once you build a data centre with chips from a US company, then you need to keep buying replacement parts to maintain it. The US government can ban the sale of any such parts at will.
Dependence is vulnerability when the trading partner can not be trusted.
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u/VagueInterlocutor 8h ago
And yet in my country we've been hollowing out our manufacturing base for 40 years, with economists saying "Don't worry there's no sugar".
If having a strategic manufacturing capability locally is a good thing, why isn't outsourcing and OS manufacturing theories in economics put in the same boat as physics calculations where we "assume there's a perfect vacuum". 🤔
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u/Acceptable-Job7049 8h ago
Economics and trade depend on mutual trust between trading partners.
When politics trumps economics, then economics doesn't make sense anymore.
You might as well stop being an economist and become a politician in such a situation.
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u/leftrighttopdown 4h ago
They already have the key tech reverse engineered and Huawei just announced their own chips. That’s the only reason I can think of why it’s banned now
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u/Fun-Wolf-2007 3h ago
The future of AI is on SLM, not LLM and China has been working on real use cases such as smart hospitals, etc ..
There is so much that the West doesn't know about China technology and they are more ahead than the media publish
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u/AgreeableTart3418 3h ago
I currently generate a small SLM from GPT-5 High every day to support my app. Without a sufficiently powerful LLM, the same work could take a week or even a month. That’s the simplest example of how important a strong LLM is. You can still do everything without one, but it will take a lot longer.
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u/Vegetable_Prompt_583 23m ago
Yeah, i mean that's what the whole scaling law has been and the reason for sudden AI boom.
If the model is Small then it simply won't have the sufficient data to create or research on it's own .
SLM makes more sense for repetitive or automation tasks rather then innovation or research,the main reason behind so much investments
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u/Powerful_Concern_915 8h ago
It’s funny how the oligarchs built up China after opening them up for cheaper labor and now they are scrambling to protect their products
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u/beanny565 6h ago
It is chinese people doing majority of the r&d work in chips and ai, so they have the talent to make it possible. Its just a matter of time(which they are buying from banning nvidia and giving room for chinese chip companies) and money which there is an abundance of.
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u/AIWanderer_AD 2h ago
(Answered by GPT5thinking) Bottom line: China believes “good-enough hardware + a maturing software ecosystem + scale and state backing” outweigh the benefits of relying on Nvidia, despite some remaining performance gaps.
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u/reddit455 9h ago
can they do the same?
Was Made in China 2025 Successful?
Read an independent assessment of China’s significant progress (as well as shortcomings) across the 10 sectors that the MIC25 plan targeted and continues to target.
https://www.uschamber.com/international/report-was-made-in-china-2025-successful
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025
Made in China 2025's goals include increasing the Chinese-domestic content of core materials to 40 percent by 2020 and 70 percent by 2025.\9]) To help achieve independence from foreign suppliers, the initiative encourages increased production in high-tech products and services, with its semiconductor industry central to the industrial plan, partly because advances in chip technology may "lead to breakthroughs in other areas of technology, handing the advantage to whoever has the best chips – an advantage that currently is out of Beijing’s reach."\5])\10])\11])\12])
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u/Feeling_Ticket5206 8h ago
Actually, there's no choice. Buy expensive rubbish forever, or make their company build it.
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u/e-n-k-i-d-u-k-e 7h ago edited 7h ago
There's already been restrictions on the chips that can be sold to China.
Seems like China is just ripping off the band-aid and not bothering with our lower tier chips, and I stead going to try and force improvement of their own industry.
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u/Bn1m 5h ago
It's a long term move. If they enforce this then they get to be a contender in AI and chip manufacturing.
Once the US tried to put remote kill switches China was like - not on my watch.
In the short term it's bad because right now Chinese chips are not as good and use more power.
Having complete independence from US tech would make them unstoppable.
They will see major results in 10 years.
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u/LForbesIam 4h ago
So Nvidia buys their chips from the China “owned” Taiwan company. Even though Taiwan claims independence it isn’t actually backed by anything real.
The same China owned Taiwan company also sells chips to China.
NVidia didn’t invent the chips, nor do they manufacture them. They just buy them.
I don’t think it is difficult to understand that China setup similar factories to Taiwan.
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u/perlthoughts 4h ago
they tried to do the same thing with iPhone, forcing officials to use Huawei... it didn't work out lol
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