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US gov fires a warning shot at Nvidia
- andrewstuart 3y agoNvidia appears disinterested in US national security interests and sees sales restrictions as simply an obstacle to be gamed and snuck around.
- tsukikage 3y agoIf we draw a line and say "everything on this side of the line is permitted", of /course/ Nvidia are going to try to sell the most expensive things that can be sold from the permitted side of the line. They have a duty to, within the bounds of the law, maximise shareholder profits. That's how capitalism works - it's how we've built basically all of western society. Everything on the permissible side of the line we draw will be done. This is the entire purpose of having a line separating options into permissible and forbidden. So we shouldn't cross our fingers and lie about where we want the line to be drawn; we should make sure we draw the line where we actually want it to be. If we don't want Nvidia selling anything at all in China, we need to say so already, rather than just shouting at them for doing things we said they were allowed to do.
- yawnxyz 3y agoDoesn't Nvidia hold all the (literally/figuratively) chips here? If they told the US to screw off, wouldn't we see a huge migration of companies to Europe / other countries so they could purchase their GPUs?
- TerrifiedMouse 3y agoWorst case, the US government declares Nvidia a threat to national security, arrest its executives, and nationalize the whole company.
- HenryBemis 3y agoIf I were every other tech company I would be pooping my pants. So if the US gov plays this with Nvidia, what does stop them to do the same for the information in X, FB, YT, and any other trove of information? Unless (as we now know from the Twitterfiles) the US gov already has their hands on the information of all the aforementioned.
- TerrifiedMouse 3y ago> what does stop them to do the same for the information in X, FB, YT, and any other trove of information? Nothing. I believe all governments in theory have the power to do that in one way or another. Governments write and enforce the laws of their country.
- SilverBirch 3y agoYeah it would be easy, just close down their headquarters in Santa Clara, find a new semiconductor fab - because TSMC sure as hell isn't siding against the US, in fact neither is Samsung or Intel, so lets say build their own fab business. Then all they have to do is find a new set of customers because none of the US big tech companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft etc. are going to join them...
- seydor 3y agoChina would be happy to use those ASML machines, I imagine
- TerrifiedMouse 3y agoNvidia is fabless the last time I checked and doesn’t own any fabrication equipment.
- Wool2662 3y agoOr you know, buy a senator or two and do whatever they feel like... Pretty sure some of the super ethical companies you listed would even chip in a few million. They are well on the way to eroding any kind of oversight as is. Just give them a bit more time.
- amelius 3y agoNo, if they mess up one generation for one reason or the other, others will catch up and might take over their position. Apple came from almost nothing and built a GPU in a few years. I think the government might like their way of locking things down too. (Not a fan myself).
- SilverBirch 3y agoI'm not sure what to think about this. Leaving aside whether this trade war is a good idea, I think this is a really bad look from Nvidia. It's not a good look to be undermining US sanctions, at the end of the day the US has the power to basically entirely crush Nvidia's exports into China. Given that's the case it would have been a lot smarter to work with the US gov to figure out what was an acceptable level for the exports they do, rather than play these bullshit games and risk a punitive response. The US really isn't joking about these sanctions.
- leovingi 3y ago>to figure out what was an acceptable level for the exports they do But that is exactly what they did. The acceptable level of exports is whatever the law says it is and Nvidia followed the law. "to get around US export restrictions" is just a sneaky way of saying "to comply with US export restrictions".
- SenHeng 3y agoThere's following the letter of the law, then there's following the spirit of the law. This is when being a robot isn't helpful.
- seydor 3y agofirst ASML ban, now Nvidia. Being so controlling with the world's manufacturing to such an extent may not end up well for the US
- RandomLensman 3y agoDid kind of work in the cold war.
- seydor 3y agoi m not sure the dutch would accept a US ban so easily during the cold war.
- RandomLensman 3y agoIt was very strict what you could legally export (or even bring) to the USSR and Netherlands was part of CoCom.
- usrnm 3y agoThe US already threatened to invade the Netherlands a few years ago, it worked like a charm. There isn't much the Dutch can do, when the US wants something from them
- dragonwriter 3y ago> The US already threatened to invade the Netherlands a few years ago, it worked like a charm. It worked...at what, exactly? I mean, leaving aside whether what was in question was actually a threat, I don't see that it has had any substantive effect on the policy either of the Netherlands or of the particular international institution headquartered in The Hague that that was its subject, so I don't see how it can be described as working like a charm, except as a piece of US domestic propaganda (which was its real purpose, of course.)
- b112 3y agoProvide solid links, when you make such clearly outrageous claims. No way the US threatened troops into the Netherlands, and the Dutch would have never capitulated. At all. All of Western Europe would join in. The best I can figure is the US threatened to extract someone in an op. That's not invasion, and even that seems hard to buy. So link please. And to a real news source, not some guy going on about it on tiktok or youtube, or a blog by a random person.
- robertlagrant 3y agoThis article seems extremely one-sided. The new products comply with the rules. Why are you changing the rules? Grandstanding over power instead of just writing better rules doesn't seem like a great approach. Other people do all the difficult stuff, because if they stop they don't get paid. Getting paid (and lauded) for doing a bad job writing down some rules and complaining when they're followed is not great.
- PaywallBuster 3y agothe "spirit" of the law is to restrict access to china to advanced type of chips so if the law is permissive enough it allows easily getting around it, they can just rewrite the laws or go after nvidia directly for breaking the "spirit" of the law
- mytailorisrich 3y ago> or go after nvidia directly for breaking the "spirit" of the law The legal obligation is to comply with what the law actually says, not what the legislator possibly had in mind when they wrote the law...
- iinnPP 3y agoYou should read the law before making such outrageous statements. Judges absolutely do look at the intent of lawmakers and rule on that intent.
- mytailorisrich 3y agoThe "intent of lawmakers" is based on what the law actually says, and when that is not clear because of ambiguous drafting (crucial point) then it is interpreted based on what the legislator must have meant in context. Here if the law says "don't sell A to China" then you don't sell A to China but obviously you're free to sell B or C if you want to, you can't claim that the "spirit" and what was actually meant was not to sell anything at all...
- extheat 3y agoTit for tat moves like this serves no legitimate public interest. The fact that Nvidia can even "redesign" and nerf chips on the fly should perhaps make it obvious to keen observers how ridiculous trying to control compute is. The bureaucrats have no idea what they're working with, a surface level grasp of technology and then naturally confabulate how impactful these trade wars are for political clout. If it were China doing this against the United States, what do you think would happen? Would we just bend over and deal with the slow tech? Or would we be pushed to work even faster? Obviously, all this is going to do is spur up domestic ASIC chip design and production. It's a net-win for China, with some short term pain.
- ilaksh 3y agoWhat's the ultimate goal that the US has in denying these chips? It's just strategically to slow down the military and other development of China, right? Or are they hoping that China will give in to some political demand?
- rhdunn 3y agoPreventing China for using these chips for AI. So they cannot be used for things like LLMs, or possibly in espionage such as generating fake images, video, and audio.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- hackerlight 3y ago> It's just strategically to slow down the military and other development of China, right? Probably this. Many in the foreign policy establishment expect a war with China within 10 years.
- snovv_crash 3y agoThey only need to postpone China's military tech development until their demographic issues catch up with them. At that point China won't have the luxury of being expansionist and will need to settle down to take care of its aging population.
- hackerlight 3y agoThat's right. In the super long-run steady state, what matters is population size (along with wealth and industrial production). If the US can maintain the status quo of the US having a slightly bigger economy, and just buy time for the US population to grow via immigration while the Chinese population declines, then eventually the world will be back to the geopolitical reality of the 2000s with a unipolar world with the US on top. China will still have revisionist and irredentist intent but won't be capable of carrying it out, and the US policy of containment will be successful.
- tiffanyh 3y agoFiduciary Responsibility This is a tricky one where it’s a lose/lose for Nvidia. They have a fiduciary responsibility to investors to drive more revenue (while being compliant with laws), US gov doesn’t like that Nvidia is driving sales while technically being compliant to the letter of the law.
- b112 3y agoThey have far wider latitude with fiduciary responsibility, which is not a requirement. There are examples of such, and a primary would be a company taking an environmental stance. EG, leaving profit on the table for environmental reasons. So it really isn't that tricky at all.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y agoNo they do not. They have a duty to act in the interest of shareholders which basically means- don't abuse your position to enrich yourself.
- RagnarD 3y agoSo rather than making China dependent on a U.S. supply chain, clearly the USG should block products and motivate China to spend billions to develop their own native chip design and manufacturing. Good thing they don't know how to make stuff. Any bets on how long until Chinese chips are the cutting edge on the planet?
- ikekkdcjkfke 3y agoConsidering everyone else is trying to catch up to nvidia it would be hard, but these players don't play by any rules..
- dataking 3y agowe all play by the rules of physics and nowhere is that more evident than in leading-edge semiconductor manufacturing ;-)
- HenryBemis 3y agoI think the father implied that "they don't play by the rules" = they will try to hack/steal secrets instead of completing their own race to the betterment of technology. There was a hack on 23andme.. if I was China/Russia, and it would be me hacking 23andme then I would have a wealth of information about children out of wedlock (blackmail), sick people (bribing), etc.
- DeathArrow 3y ago>I think the father implied that "they don't play by the rules" = they will try to hack/steal secrets instead of completing their own race to the betterment of technology. And US never stole secrets?
- ben_w 3y ago> I would have a wealth of information about children out of wedlock (blackmail) And then there's a moment of cultural confusion as the younger generation of parents looks at the person attempting blackmail and says "Correct, we couldn't afford the wedding. Were you offering to pay for one?"
- saberience 3y agoThis is all on the US gov for creating regulations which they later realized were crappy. The US gov created some rules which basically set some limit on the max bi-directional bandwidth of the chip, the max number of operations per second (4800 TOPS), and in the latest regulation they added another rule around “performance density”. So basically they said something like: if you make a chip that has (in my arbitrary units) less than 100 TOPS, 500 bandwidth, and 200 performance density, then it’s OK to go to China. So Nvidia made a chip that has 99 TOPS, 499 bandwidth, and 199 performance, which of course would be legal to export. And now the government is saying, well, we don’t like that. Which doesn’t make a lot of sense to me given they previously said they were OK with chips not hitting those limits being exported. I don’t think you can blame Nvidia for taking the government at face value, assuming the government picked what they consider to be good values for their “chip banning equation” and then making chips that apply to the new rule. This just seems to me like the US gov doesn’t know what they want exactly and thus keeps changing their regulation, none of which is a surprise to me. The whole thing reeks of incompetence.
- appplication 3y ago> This just seems to me like the US gov doesn’t know what they want exactly They know exactly what they want. Writing regulations to attain that without too many unintended consequences or negative impacts on the US is the difficult part.
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- atticora 3y ago[flagged]
- varelse 3y ago[dead]
- DeathArrow 3y agoWell, US sanctions against China led China to develop their domestic semiconductor industry. SMIC can now fab 7 and 5 nm chips. In a decade, they will probably be on par with TSM. Banning AI chips exports will have the same effect. Long term US will lose money from sales while China will use their newly developed industries to earn more. This move is only to win some votes at the next elections.
- t324oi234j3434 3y agoSeems quite stupid (as is expected from Govts.). Reminds me of the Crypto ban that the USGOV was trying to impose in the 90s. Utter idiots running things as always.
- maxglute 3y agoAI novel domain, no one knows what spirit of the law actually means with respect to AI other than some vague intentions of limiting PRC access to compute that can do military AI stuff. Even then, what does that actually mean? LLM models to help PLA shuffle paperwork, or coordinate drone swarms? What level of compute enables what, and what happens when models shrink to work on less powerful hardware. Regulators made educated guess to legislate it as XYZ fixed levels of compute that's fraction of current compute, which doesn't scale, reasoning it will increase compute gap over time. Nvidia obeys law, because I surmise even they don't know what threshold of compute translates to what potential military capabilities - it would be crazy if were so integrated into US MIC that they do. Queue Raimondo fires warning shot at Nvidia for following law. The logic behind these moves is to make doing business with PRC expensive in the hopes uncertainty would compel AI sector to reduce business with PRC out of their own volition. Because when US gov doesn't actually know how to regulate compute controls, thereby can't effectively regulate with rule of law, they resort to rule by law (PRC playbook) to shape behaviour. A few flip flops might seem like regulatory incompetence, but enough sustained flip flops to create enviroment of uncertainty is strategy.